Thomas F. La Porta received his B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from The
Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from 
Columbia University, New York, NY. He joined the Computer Science and Engineering
Department at Penn State in 2002 as a Full Professor.  He is the Director of
the Networking  and Security Research Center at Penn State.  Prior to joining Penn State,
Dr. La Porta was with Bell Laboratories since 1986. He was 
the Director of the Mobile Networking Research Department in Bell Laboratories, 
Lucent Technologies where he led various projects in wireless and
mobile networking. He is an IEEE Fellow, Bell Labs Fellow, received the Bell Labs Distinguished 
Technical Staff Award in 1996, and an Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award 
in 1996.  He also won a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2005.
His research interests include mobility management, signaling and control for wireless 
networks, mobile data systems, and protocol design. 

Dr. La Porta was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and an 
Associate Editor editor for the ACM/Kluwer Journal of Mobile Networking 
and Applications and KICS Journal of Communications and Networks.  He served as
Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Personal Communications Magazine for three years and is 
currently a Senior Advisor.  He has published over 50 technical papers and holds
28 patents. He was an adjunct member of faculty at Columbia
University for 7 years where he taught courses on mobile networking and 
protocol design.