Pooi-Yuen Kam

Pooi-Yuen Kam (Life Fellow, IEEE) was born in Ipoh, Malaysia. He received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1972, 1973, and 1976, respectively.

From 1976 to 1978, he was a member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ, USA, where he was engaged in packet network studies. Since 1978, he has been a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), National University of Singapore (NUS), where he served as the Deputy Dean of Engineering and the Vice Dean for Academic Affairs of the Faculty of Engineering from 2000 to 2003. He spent the sabbatical year 1987 to 1988 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, under the sponsorship of the Hitachi Scholarship Foundation. In 2006, he was invited to the School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, as the David Bensted Fellow. He was a Distinguished Guest Professor (Global) at the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Keio University, Tokyo, from April 2015 to March 2017. In 2019, he became an Emeritus Professor of NUS after he retired from the ECE Department. Since 2016, he has also been with the National University of Singapore Suzhou Research Institute, Suzhou, China, where he is the principal investigator of a project on free-space optical communications. His research interests are in communication and information theory and signal processing, and their applications to wireless and optical communications.

Dr. Kam is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to receiver design and performance analysis for wireless communications. He is also a Fellow of the AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association) and a Fellow of the IES (Institution of Engineers, Singapore). He served on the IEEE VTS Fellow Evaluation Committee for 2013, 2014 and 2015, on the IEEE ComSoc Fellow Evaluation Committee for 2020 through 2022, and has been serving on the IEEE VTS Awards Committee since year 2019 through the present. He served on the IEEE Fellow Committee for years 2016, 2017 and 2018, and on the IEEE Fellows Strategic Planning Subcommittee for 2018 and 2019. In years 2021 and 2022, he served on the Awards Committee of the Wireless Technical Committee of IEEE ComSoc, and in 2023 on the Awards Committee of the Radio Communications Technical Committee of IEEE ComSoc. He received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE VTC2004-Fall, at the IEEE VTC2011-Spring, at the IEEE ICC2011, and at the IEEE/CIC ICCC2015. He was the Co-Chair of the Communication Theory Symposium of IEEE Globecom 2014. From 2011 through 2017, he was a Senior Editor of IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS. From 1996 to 2011, he served as the Editor for Modulation and Detection for Wireless Systems of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS. From 2007 to 2012, he served on the editorial board of PHYCOM, the Journal of Physical Communications (Elsevier).