Robert Calderbank

Robert Calderbank directs the Rhodes Information initiative at Duke University, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics. 

He started his career in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, and he left AT&T in 2003 as Vice President for Research. Calderbank directed the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University before joining Duke University in 2010. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, he received the 2015 Hamming Medal, and the 2015 Shannon Award.

Calderbank is known for contributions to voiceband modem technology at the dawn of the internet, and for contributions to wireless communication that are incorporated in billions of cell phones. His contributions to quantum error correction provide a foundation for fault tolerant quantum computation. At Duke University, Calderbank has developed a new model of problem driven team activity, focused on data science, that has transformed undergraduate summer research.