Richard D. Gitlin is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus at the University of South Florida and a Professor in USF's Institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation. He has more than 50 years of leadership in the communications industry and in academia, and he has a record of significant research and leadership contributions that have been sustained and prolific over several decades. Gitlin received a doctorate from Columbia University in 1969 and joined Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies for 32 years, where he was the co-inventor of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and a pioneer in the use of adaptive antenna arrays for wireless communications [now known as MIMO] a foundation technology for 4G/5G/6G and WiFi wireless systems. At his retirement from Bell Labs in 2001, he was Senior Vice President for communications and networking research, and subsequently was a Visiting Professor at Columbia, then CTO of Hammerhead Systems a Silicon Valley networking startup, and then Distinguished University Professor at USF.

Dr. Gitlin has made fundamental, paradigm-shifting contributions over several decades revolutionizing both wireline and wireless communications that are manifest in almost all of today’s high bit-rate, multimedia services. He is best known for two high-impact contributions that shattered the prevailing bit-rate limits achievable by then-current technology: in wireline, co-invention of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology and, in wireless, pioneering smart antenna systems, known today as MIMO. In wireline systems, DSL enabled megabits/second over existing copper telephone company loops (bidirectional links between customer premises and the telephone central offices), when the highest speed attainable by conventional modems was 33.4 kb/s. In wireless systems, Dr. Gitlin’s smart antenna work were first to demonstrate that spatial domain processing can provide a substantial capacity gain (on the order of the number of transmitter and receiver antenna pairs) and/or diversity gain for improved reception without increasing bandwidth.

He joined USF in 2007, where he was a State of Florida 21st Century World Class Scholar, Distinguished University Professor, and he held the Agere Systems endowed chair in Electrical Engineering. His research focused on the intersection of communications with medicine (characterizing in vivo wireless communications, a robotic imaging system to enhance minimally invasive surgery, and a new form of electrocardiogram that provides 24/7 diagnostic quality cardiac care information in a compact personal device that can indicate and potentially predict cardiac events), as well as research on 5G/6G wireless and IoT (Internet of Things) wireless networks directed towards ultra-reliability, high throughput, and low latency networking.

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), AAAS Fellow, Bell Laboratories Fellow, Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (FNAI), recipient of the 2025 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, co-recipient of the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, and the S.O. Rice prize in communications, and an inductee in the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Gitlin has served as Chair of the Communication Theory Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, as a member of the Communications Society Awards Board, as Editor for communication theory of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society, and a member of the Nominations and Elections Board. He has also served on the Advisory Committee for Computer Science and Engineering (CISE) of the National Science Foundation. He has co-authored a data communications text, has published 175 papers, and holds 75 U.S. patents.