Speaker Bio
Dr. Tom Rondeau is the Principal Director for the FutureG & 5G Office for the US Department of Defense, serving in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)). In this role, Dr. Rondeau is responsible for the research, funding, and execution of programs to advance warfighting capabilities using 5G and future-generation wireless technologies.
Before assuming his role as Principal Director of the FutureG &5G Office, Dr. Rondeau spent more than six years as a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) program manager, where he worked on numerous technology areas to improve wireless networking and communications, which earned him the Distinguished Public Service Medal. Some of the programs he managed involved building software-defined arrays driving towards more capable software-defined radio, inventing new edge and embedded processor architectures, and enabling computing on encrypted data. During his time at DARPA, Dr. Rondeau also ran a series of hackfests on software radio and served as a subject matter expert on numerous problem sets for the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community.
Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Rondeau was the Project Lead for the GNU Radio project. In this role, Dr. Rondeau collaborated with numerous companies and organizations worldwide to build solutions to complex problems, thus forming a large community of experts in software radio that has grown into a thriving ecosystem.
Dr. Rondeau has published extensively on software radio, notably in Cognitive Radios in Public Safety and Spectrum Management, one of the first books on cognitive radio. Dr. Rondeau also served as a visiting researcher with the University of Pennsylvania and as an Adjunct with the IDA Center for Communications Research in Princeton, NJ.
Dr. Rondeau holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech. His dissertation won the Council of Graduate Schools’ 2007 Outstanding Dissertation Award in math, science, and engineering.