Genealogy 
My complete academic genealogy:
  • Grandkids!
    • Matt's PhD students include professors at Navaminda Kasatriyadhiraj Royal Air Force Academy, Naval Postgraduate School, Utah State University, University of Washington at Bothell, University of Central Missouri, and Seoul Women's University.

    • Aruna has many PhDs in the pipeline and 5 PhD graduates already.

  • My students: I've awarded many MS degrees and 10 PhD degrees. The list of fantastic MS graduate students that I've worked with in the past is Nathan Baughman, Nandini Natarajan, Kevin Labonte, Bridget Dahill, Yoshiya Kinuta, Katrina Hanna, Jacky C.-K. Chu, Daniel LaFlamme, Ping Hung-Lee, N. Boris Margolin, Matt Yurkewych, Michael Barry, Aaron St. John, Anthony Bellissimo, John Burgess, Patrick Stahlberg, John Tuttle, Steve Hannum, Swagatika Prusty, Ryan Hurley, Jingyi Guo, Saksham Varma, Arta Ravazi, and Adam Rivelli. ... I'm proud of all of them!

    My students to graduate with a PhD so far are: Dr. Matthew K. Wright, currently Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology; Dr. Marc Liberatore now Teaching Faculty at UMass; Dr. George Bissias, now a Research Assistant Professor at UMass; Dr. Aruna Balasubramanian, now an Associate Professor at SUNY Stony Brook; Dr. Hamed Soroush was a Principal Investigator and Technical Team Lead at PARC and now at Zoox; Dr. Jim Partan has continued on as a research engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI); Dr. Robert Walls received his MS degree from Matt at UT Arlington but then joined UMass to work with me, screwing up any pretty graph layout of this genealogy. He's now an Associate Profesor at WPI; Dr. Kimberly Ferguson-Walter (co-advised with David Jensen) continues to work for the govt; Keen Sung is a Research Scientist at AuCoDe. Most recent is Dr. Pinar Ozisik who is working at MIT!

    0. PhD 1999 from UC Santa Cruz. MS from UCSC in 1996, both with JJ. I received a B.S. in Applied Math & Computer Science in 1994 from Univ. of Albany, where Prof. Deepak Kapur (now at UNM) allowed me a chance to do undergraduate research. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was a great experience.


  1. My advisor is J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves. (The best advisor on the list!) As of 2023 Professor of ECE and Canada Excellence Research Chair at the University of Toronto. Previously Distinguished Professor and Chair at UC Santa Cruz, Computer Engineering Department. PhD 1982 from the University of Hawaii, Electrical Engineering. An ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and AAAS Fellow. JJ keeps a list of my over 40 (wow!) academic siblings, including my good friend and colleague Clay Shields. Working with JJ changed my life.


  2. J.J.'s advisor is Franklin F. Kuo. Professor at Univ of Hawaii. PhD 1958 from Univ. Illinos Urbana-Champaign, Electrical Engineering. I met Frank just once. He was director of the landmark ALOHA wireless networking project, which is why JJ went to study there.


  3. Frank's advisor was Mac Van Valkenburg. Professor at UIUC, EE. (1923-1997). PhD 1952 from Stanford University, Electrical Engineering. Dissertation title, "Polarization and Fading Studies of Meteoric Radio Echoes". The last two photos show Kuo with Valkenburg. In 2004, the IEEE Education Society began an annual Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award. According to the IEEE, "Dr. Van Valkenburg joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1955.  From 1966 to 1974, he served as professor and head of electrical engineering at Princeton University before returning to the University of Illinois." He was named to a chaired position and was a Dean of Engineering. He "authored of seven textbooks, was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, he received the Lamme Medal, the highest honor of the American Society for Engineering Education; the George Westinghouse Award from the same organization; the Education Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; and the Halliburton Engineering Education Leadership Award of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois."  See this Memoriam, which notes he had 50 PhD students!


  4. Mac's advisor was Oswald Garrison Villard, jr. (1917-2004; (Obit 1 and 2) Professor at Stanford University. PhD Stanford University EE 1949 (joined the faculty at Stanford in 1946!) (Wikipedia.)

    Mac had a second advisor according to the Mathematical Genealogy site: Laurence Albert Manning. I'm not sure what role Manning played, but the interesting thing about him is that we can work our way to Da Vinici's advisor: Robert Arthur Helliwell (1948), Karl Ralph Spangenberg (1937), William Littell Everitt (1933), Frederic Columbus Blake (1906), Ernest Fox Nichols (1897), Edward Leamington Nichols (1879), Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1842), Johannes Peter Muller (1822), Philipp Franz von Walther (1803), Georg Joseph Beer (1786), Joseph Barth (1772), Anton von Storck (1757), Gerard van Swieten (1725), Herman Boerhaave (1693), Wolferd Senguerdius (1667), Arnold Senguerdius (1630), Antonius Thysius (1589), Theodorus Beza (1539), Melchior Wolmar (1528), Jacobus Faber (1480), Johannes Argyropoulos (1444), who advised Da Vinci, apparently. That chain is both interesting and ridiculous. Did Argyropoulous actual advise da Vinci? I think the notion of an advisor was not quite the same back then compared to now (dry cleaning wasn't even invented until 1800s, so what errands were these graduate students running?) and probably means he was a teacher of da Vinci's. Wikipedia provides some evidence of that relationship.


  5. Oswald's advisor was Frederick E. Terman (1900-1982). Professor at Stanford University (from 1925). D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in June 1924 from MIT. Terman's dissertation was on ``Characteristics and Stability of Transmission Lines.'' Legendary figure. (Sibling of Claude Shannon.)


  6. Fred's advisor was Vannevar Bush (1890-1974). Professor at MIT. PhD 1916 jointly from Harvard and MIT. Wrote "As We May Think", headed the Manhattan Project, started the NSF, and is a pioneer of computer science. He earned his doctorate in a single year! Other descendants include Shannon and David Huffman. Huffman was a professor at UCSC when I was there, but I never had the opportunity to take a class from him.

    Bush's colleague on the Manhattan Project was Robert Oppenheimer, who is the academic great-grandparent of my graduate school friends and housemates James Bullock and Ari Maller!


  7. Vannevar's advisor was Arthur Edwin Kennelly (1861-1939)Bio-2. Professor at Harvard and then MIT in EE from 1906. Biography.com has this to say: "Born in Bombay, raised in England, he left school at age 13 and taught himself physics while working as a telegrapher. He emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1887 to become Edison's [chief] electrical researcher [and mathematician]... He deduced the existence of an atmospheric ionized reflecting layer, the Kennelly-Heaviside layer." He won the 1933 Thomas Edison Medal in 1933 for "For meritorious achievements in electrical science, electrical engineering and the electrical arts as exemplified by his contributions to the theory of electrical transmission and to the development of international electrical standards." Elsewhere the IEEE says that "In 1887 Arthur E. Kennelly came to the US from London and became the principal assistant to Edison. He was AIEE President from 1898-1900. In 1902 he became professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard, and became professor emeritus in 1930 at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was very active in telephone research specifically in the mathematical treatment of transmission lines." Several other accounts exist. The last school he attended was the University School London, a boy's school that still exists.

Our god-father advisor!
Kennelly had no graduate advisor, so our search ends. But I count Thomas A. Edison (1847--1931) as his mentor. Kennelly is reported as saying, "The privilege which I had being with this great man for six years was the greatest inspiration of my life." Here's more from a 1931 NYT article (pdf) on the day of Edison's death. As Edison was also self-taught, attending school for a total of three months of his entire life, our search defintely stops there!