Thomas F. La Porta is the Director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Penn State University. He is an Evan Pugh Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Electrical Engineering Department. He 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 Penn State in 2002. He was the founding Director of the Institute of Networking and Security Research at Penn State. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. La Porta was with Bell Laboratories for 17 years. 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, and an Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award. He also won two Thomas Alva Edison Patent Awards. His research interests include mobility management, signaling and control for wireless networks, security for wireless systems, mobile data systems, and protocol design.

Dr. La Porta was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Personal Communications Magazine. He was the Director of Magazines for the IEEE Communications Society and was on its Board of Governors for three years. He has published numerous papers and holds 39 patents. He was an adjunct member of faculty at Columbia University for 7 years where he taught courses on mobile networking and protocol design.