Stanford electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate Himanshu Asnani M.S. ’11 will be awarded the Marconi Society’s 2014 Paul Baran Young Scholar Award in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 2. The award commends young individuals’ outstanding academic work and leadership in the fields of communications and information science.

The Marconi Society chooses winners from nominations by faculty, department chairs or managers. Young Scholar Award winners receive a financial stipend and travel funds to attend the annual Marconi Award Dinners. Kiseok Song, a Ph.D. candidate at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), has also been selected for the award this year.

Originally from Kota, India, Asnani received a Bachelor of Technology from the Electrical Engineering School at IIT Bombay in 2009. In addition to being a Ph.D. student, he currently works at Ericsson Silicon Valley’s R&D Department as a System Engineer.

Asnani’s graduate studies have centered on information theory, including research in the areas of human genome compression and cooperation in communication.

“Himanshu has made profound contributions to our understanding of the fundamental limits in new communication and data compression scenarios (both point-to-point and multi-terminal), the structure of the schemes that achieve these limits, their implementation and their performance in practice,” said professor of electrical engineering and Asnani’s advisor Tsachy Weissman in a statement to the Marconi Society.

Asnani’s research has allowed him to combine his vast interests in medicine, technology and communication to address timely real-world problems. According to Weissman, some companies that manage large amounts of sequenced genomic data are even considering implementing Asnani’s schemes for meta-genomic data compression.

Contact Sarah Moore at smore6 “at” stanford.edu.