- Signal Kinetics
Fadel Adib is an Associate Professor in the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is the founding director of the Signal Kinetics group which invents wireless and sensor technologies for networking, health monitoring, robotics, and ocean IoT. He is also the founder & CEO of Cartesian Systems, a spinoff from his lab that focuses on mapping indoor environments using wireless signals.
Adib earned his Bachelor’s from the American University of Beirut (2011), which named him a Distinguished Young Alumnus in 2017. He was awarded a presidential fellowship to pursue his graduate studies at MIT, where he received his Master’s (2013) and Ph.D. (2016), winning the best Master’s and best Ph.D. thesis awards in Computer Science at MIT. In 2018, Adib’s Ph.D. thesis won the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award, recognizing it as the world’s best doctoral dissertation in wireless networks and mobile computing. His Ph.D. work on seeing through walls was named as one of the 50 ways MIT has transformed computer science over the past 50 years. This work has been commercialized by a startup, Emerald Innovations, whose devices have already been deployed in hundreds of homes and are being used by doctors at major US hospitals to monitor patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and COVID-19.
Adib has been named to Technology Review’s list of the world's top 35 innovators under 35 (TR35) in 2014 and to Forbes’ list of 30 under 30 in 2015. He has also received prestigious faculty honors including the CAREER Award (2019) from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Young Investigator Award (2019) and the Early Career Grant (2020) from the Office of Naval Research, the Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), the Google Faculty Research Award (2017), and the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award (2022). His research has won awards for best papers, demos, and highlights at premier academic venues (SIGCOMM, MobiCom, CHI, CACM, Nature Electronics, Nature Communications). His work has also been widely featured in the news (BBC, CNN, WSJ, WaPo, The Guardian, Der Spiegel) and major TV shows (The Big Bang Theory, CBS This Morning). Adib has had the honor to present and demo his research to multiple heads of state, including President Obama at the White House, as well as to the Director of National Intelligence, the Chairman of the FCC, the FDA, and in the UK House of Lords.