Wade Trappe received his B.A. in Mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1994 and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing from the University of Maryland in 2002. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University, and Associate Director of the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), where he directs WINLAB's research in wireless security.
He has led several federally-funded projects in the area of cybersecurity and communication systems, projects involving security and privacy for sensor networks, physical layer security for wireless systems, security for cognitive radios, the development of wireless testbed resources (ORBIT testbed), and new RFID technologies. Prof. Trappe led a DARPA initiative into validating and prototyping physical layer security mechanisms, an Army Research Office project on the theory of physical layer security, and continues working in this field to tackle challenges that must be addressed for it to become adopted. He was involved in the DARPA RadioMap, SSPARC and Wireless Network Defense programs, and was Principal Investigator for the original DARPA Spectrum Challenge. He has worked with the Army in developing cognitive radio technologies, and validating new MIMO and OFDM waveforms. He has developed several cross-layer security mechanisms for wireless networks, jamming detection and jamming defense mechanisms for wireless networks, and has investigated privacy-enhancing routing methods. Recently, he has started working on problems at the intersection of communications and medicine, including developing security solutions for the Internet of Medical Things and mathematically modeling different biological systems with the goal of identifying new therapeutic strategies.
Professor Trappe has published roughly 200 papers, including six best papers awards (two in media security, one in Internet design, one in cognitive radio systems, one in mobile computing, and one in wireless security). His papers have appeared in numerous IEEE/ACM journals and premier conferences, spanning the areas of signal processing and security. His experience in network security and wireless spans over 15 years, and he has co-authored a popular textbook in security, Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory, as well as several notable monographs on wireless security, including Securing Wireless Communications at the Physical Layer and Securing Emerging Wireless Systems: Lower-layer Approaches. Professor Trappe has served as the US Regional Director for IEEE Signal Processing Society, Chair of the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee, and as an editor for several journals including IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM), and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC). He is currently working with the Westchester Biotech Project on supporting their upcoming initiative involving the Mobile Patient.