James S. Lehnert received the B.S. (Highest Honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1978, 1981, and 1984, respectively. From 1978 to 1984, he was a research assistant at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. Dr. Lehnert was a University of Illinois Fellow from 1978 to 1979 and an IBM Pre-Doctoral Fellow from 1982 to 1984. He has held summer positions at Motorola Communications, Schaumburg, Illinois, in the Data Systems Research Laboratory, and Harris Corporation, Melbourne, Florida, in the Advanced Technology Department. He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, and was selected as a Purdue University Faculty Scholar in 2003. He received the IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM) Award for (Lifetime) Technical Achievement in 2009 and was identified during 2000-2010 by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher across the previous three decades.
Recent research interests include spectrum management, biological communications, code-division multiple-access (CDMA) for wireless communication networks, channel estimation, interference excision, and signal processing in software programmable radios. Research projects have included a Focused Research Initiative on wireless distributed multimedia communications, which was performed jointly with Purdue Univ., the Univ. of IL, the Univ. of MI, Hughes Network Systems, and Magnavox (now Raytheon); adaptive signal processing for spread-spectrum radios for the DARPA SUO Program, which was performed jointly with Purdue Univ., the Univ. of Michigan, and Texas Instruments (now Raytheon); adaptive signal processing and networks (ASPEN) for the DARPA Global Mobile Computing Program, which was performed jointly with Purdue Univ., the Univ. of Michigan, and Hughes Defense Communications (now Raytheon); and a National Science Foundation program in wireless communication networks, which was performed jointly with Purdue Univ. and the Univ. of Michigan. More recently, he has completed a research program for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research entitled, "Utilizing Spectrum Efficiently (USE)," which was performed jointly with Purdue Univ., the Univ. of Michigan, the Univ. of Florida, and the Ohio State University.
Dr. Lehnert has served as Editor for Spread Spectrum for the IEEE Transactions on Communications and as Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to the theory and practice of spread-spectrum multiple-access communications.