Jennifer Rexford, Princeton's provost and a professor of computer science, has recieved the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), recognizing her exceptional contributions to communications and networking sciences and engineering.
Two other Princeton-affiliated engineers have also been recognized for their lasting impact on technology, education and society. Andrea Goldsmith, dean of engineering and applied science, recieved the James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal for her broad contributions to engineering education, and Robert Kahn, alumnus, recieved the Medal of Honor for inventing the internet’s founding technologies.
Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering. IEEE cited her “for contributions to internet wide-area routing and software-defined networking.”
“I am honored to receive the Bell Medal, and I am grateful for the many colleagues and students who shared my passion for improving the performance, security and stability of the infrastructure underlying the internet,” Rexford said. “As engineers, we are fortunate to work on technical problems that are at once intellectually interesting and practically relevant. Princeton offers us a wonderful environment that cherishes both the rigor and the relevance of our research ideas.”
Rexford, who graduated from Princeton in 1991, became provost in March after serving as chair of computer science for nine years. Her research focuses on computer networking, with the larger goal of making the internet worthy of society’s trust. Prior to arriving to teach at Princeton, Rexford worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs for more than eight years, creating techniques for monitoring, traffic engineering, and router configuration deployed in AT&T’s backbone networks. She is an affiliated faculty member in electrical and computer engineering, operations research and financial engineering, and the Center for Information Technology Policy. Rexford also has led an interdisciplinary data science faculty search committee responsible for hiring faculty who use machine learning and statistics as a lens for advancing scholarship in their individual disciplines.