Dr. Phil Lundrigan has secured the National Science Foundation’s coveted CAREER Award, a five year grant reserved for the nation’s most promising early career faculty.
Fewer than one in five applicants receive this distinction, which honors visionary research and a strong commitment to teaching and outreach. The award will fund Dr. Lundrigan’s quest to develop smarter, energy efficient wireless sub-protocols and to bring those breakthroughs into the classroom and community.
Wireless protocols are the invisible rulebooks that let our devices talk to one another. Every time your phone joins your home Wi-Fi network, your watch pairs with Bluetooth earbuds, or you tap to pay with NFC, you rely on these carefully engineered instructions. Dr. Lundrigan’s research dives beneath the surface of familiar standards to design sub-protocols that unlock faster speeds, longer battery life, and more reliable connections—innovations that will power the next generation of smart homes, hospitals, and factories.
Lundrigan’s research enables existing devices to adapt to new needs and expand their range of capabilities without having to make hardware updates. Within the data devices send out, there is sometimes redundant or unnecessary information that, when lost, does not affect the output. Dr. Lundrigan and his lab are finding unique ways to replace unnecessary data with additional information.
He explained the concept by comparing it to human speech: “I'm saying words you understand, but what if I talked in a weird pattern? I might think, 'This guy doesn't really know how to talk very well,' but what if I was actually sending you a secret message through the spaces I take between words, or I mispronounce words. That could be secondary information that you could then learn something from. And so that's what we were trying to do with wireless protocols. Often exploiting data packets is used for bad things, like hiding secret messages. We're saying, can we do that for good.”
There are thousands of potential positive applications, from enhancing the security of smart doorbells and locks to wireless control of power grids and water meters. Being able to modify already existing technology wirelessly means that devices can become more resilient and communicate additional information in a time and cost-efficient manner.
"Sometimes you do your research and wonder, ‘Does anyone care about this?’" Lundrigan said. “This award is validation that people find these ideas valuable. I’m excited to start digging into this and really seeing where we can go with this idea.”
Congratulations, Dr. Lundrigan!