Brigham Young University electrical engineering student Joshua Montierth has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious honors for graduate students in STEM. The fellowship recognizes both his technical contributions to wireless communication systems and his broader commitment to expanding access to technology and education.
Joshua’s path into research began early. As a sophomore, Joshua’s performance in EC En 224 led Dr. Lundrigan to invite him to join his lab, an opportunity he continued through the IMMERSE summer research program between his sophomore and junior years. That environment shaped his approach to engineering: curiosity-driven, hands-on, and willing to challenge assumptions. Even before completing core coursework, he was designing and implementing advanced wireless systems, often teaching himself the necessary theory along the way.
“I had to learn everything from scratch,” Joshua reflected, describing how he built a full physical-layer protocol before formally taking signals and systems.
His early work included developing a noise-resilient underwater communication protocol and contributing to research that earned recognition at an international ACM conference. From there, he expanded into interdisciplinary projects, including a low-cost Bluetooth-based system for tracking handwashing compliance in healthcare environments. When the system initially failed due to poor localization accuracy, Joshua reworked the underlying algorithm to account for unequal signal confidence, ultimately reducing hardware costs to about one dollar per unit while achieving the needed performance.
That pattern—identifying inefficiencies and turning them into opportunities—has become a defining feature of his research.
His graduate research proposal, which helped secure the NSF fellowship, centers on a bold idea: instead of treating errors in wireless systems purely as problems to eliminate, they can be used as a resource.
Modern communication systems are designed with large safety margins to handle worst-case noise and interference. Most of the time, that extra correction capacity goes unused. Joshua’s work proposes intentionally introducing small, controlled “errors” into signals—perturbations that remain within correction limits—to encode a secondary stream of information without degrading the primary transmission.
In effect, he is creating additional communication channels within existing systems.
“It’s like adding more lanes to the same highway,” he explains in his proposal.
This approach could significantly improve network throughput in dense environments such as stadiums or large public events, where traditional systems struggle under heavy demand. It also opens the door to new capabilities such as secure signal watermarking and improved coordination between different wireless technologies.
Joshua has already begun building prototypes of these systems, demonstrating that meaningful data can be transmitted through frequency, timing, and phase variations without disrupting standard receivers.
His work reflects a deeper philosophy that emerged during his undergraduate experience. In both his research and coursework, he noticed that engineers often overcorrect for rare edge cases, leaving untapped potential in everyday operation. By reframing those inefficiencies, he has been able to uncover entirely new communication paradigms.
Beyond research, Joshua has invested heavily in teaching and mentorship. As a participant in the IMMERSE program, he helped develop curriculum for a new freshman electrical engineering course and later taught portions of it himself. He has also contributed to youth STEM outreach programs and plans to continue developing accessible educational tools for wireless communication.
His motivation for this work traces back to a formative experience during his mission in Brazil. There, Joshua met a teenage boy living in a rural area who, despite limited resources, was determined to pursue a future in STEM. Sitting in a small wooden home, the student used an inexpensive mobile device to watch online lessons and teach himself algebra, with a plan to continue pursuing advanced mathematics, hoping it would open doors to a better future. The moment left a lasting impression on Joshua. It revealed the quiet but powerful role wireless connectivity can play in expanding opportunity and ultimately shaped his goal to design communication systems that are more accessible, affordable, and impactful.
Receiving the NSF fellowship brings both recognition and meaningful financial support as Joshua prepares for graduate study. The award covers tuition and provides a living stipend, giving him the flexibility to focus fully on research.
“It brought a lot of peace of mind,” Joshua shared.
He also offered advice to other students considering research or applying for the fellowship, emphasizing the importance of starting early and trusting their ideas.
“You have something to bring to the table,” he said. “You never know what you’re bringing that no one else has come up with. Your simple idea can change the world.”
Joshua will continue his work in wireless communications as a graduate student, where he plans to further develop his secondary signaling framework and contribute to the next generation of communication systems.