The plenary speaker is Prof. Hesham El-Gamal from Ohio State University.

Hesham El Gamal received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1993 and 1996, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, MD, in 1999. From 1993 to 1996, he served as a Project Manager in the Middle East Regional Office of Alcatel Telecom. From 1996 to 1999, he was a Research Assistant in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of Maryland at College Park, MD. From February 1999 to December 2000, he was with the Advanced Development Group, Hughes Network Systems (HNS), Germantown, MD, as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff. In the Fall of 1999, he served as a lecturer at the University of Maryland at College Park. In January 2001 he joined the ECE Department at the Ohio State University where he is now an Associate Professor. He held visiting appointments at UCLA (Fall 2002, Winter 2003) and Institut Eurecom (Summer 2003).

He is a recipient of the HNS Annual Achievement Award (2000), the OSU College of Engineering Lumley Research Award (2003), the OSU Electrical Engineering Department FARMER Young Faculty Development Fund (2003-2008), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004). He holds 5 U.S. patents and has eight more patent applications pending. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and currently serves as an Associate Editor for ``Space-Time Coding and Spread Spectrum'' for the IEEE Transactions on Communications.