Dr. Subramaniam Awarded for Years of Research on Optical Networking


May 26, 2023

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam

Congratulations to Dr. Suresh Subramaniam on being awarded the 2022 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award by the Optical Networking Technical Committee (ONTC) of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc)! The Outstanding Technical Achievement Award is a prestigious, annual award for lifetime contributions to optical networking.

ComSoc promotes technological innovation and fosters the creation and sharing of information among the global technical community. This community comprises engineers, academics, practitioners, scientists, executives, and associates from more than 140 countries. One area of innovation ComSoc promotes is optical networking technologies, which ONTC supports. ONTC is its focal point in optical networking technologies and leads symposia, workshops, sessions, and tutorials for members interested in this area. 

Dr. Subramaniam is a world-renowned leader in the area of fiber-optic networks, which has been the predominant technology deployed in the backbone of the Internet for decades and is creeping closer and closer to the edge of the network with continuing advances in optical transmission, switching, and networking. At GW, Dr. Subramaniam’s group is involved in developing novel network architectures and algorithms and conducting performance analyses of networks.

Over a 30-year period, Dr. Subramaniam has made pioneering contributions to many areas within optical networking. These include novel network architectures, advanced resource allocation algorithms that improve network efficiency, and innovative methods to increase the network's resilience. The plaque he received from ONTC to commemorate this award reflects these innovations, as it says Dr. Subramaniam received it for his “pioneering research in the design and optimization of optical networks, particularly on optical wavelength routing algorithms, survivability aspects, and performance modeling.”

“This award recognizes my group’s research efforts in this area over the past few decades. It gives me great satisfaction to be recognized by my peers in the field, and I am deeply humbled by it. It goes without saying that this would not have been possible without the outstanding students I have been fortunate to work with,” Dr. Subramaniam said. “I look forward to continuing my research and providing mentorship to the next generation of researchers in this area.”

Dr. Subramaniam’s selection for this award was announced in an email with the following biography, which highlights his engagement with IEEE: “Suresh Subramaniam is Vice Provost for Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs and Professor and former Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2015 for his contributions to optical network architectures, algorithms, and performance modeling. He has taken on leadership roles within the optical networking community, including as Chair of the Optical Network Technical Committee (ONTC) within the IEEE Communications Society. He has also expended significant time and effort serving the research community at large by organizing several conferences and workshops and serving on the TPC of most major conferences in his field, chairing the Optical Network and Systems (ONS) symposium that is part of the flagship IEEE conferences Globecom and ICC.”