Melike Erol-Kantarci

Dr. Melike Erol-Kantarci is Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in AI-Enabled Next-Generation Wireless Networks and Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa, ON, Canada She is the founding director of the Networked Systems and Communications Research (NETCORE) laboratory. She is a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute and the Institute for Science, Society and Policy. She is also a courtesy faculty at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY.

Dr. Erol-Kantarci is an influential researcher with more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, citations over 5500 and h-index of 37 (Google Profile). She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Communications Society, appointed for the term of 2021-2023. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the N2Women: Stars in Networking and Communications. She is a sought-after speaker and has delivered 50+ keynotes plenary talks, tutorials and panels around the globe. She is the co-editor of three books “Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in Smart Cities” by CRC (2020) “Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities: Communication Networks and Services” by Wiley Press (2018) and “Smart Grid: Networking, Data Management, and Business Models” by CRC Press (2016). Her articles have been listed many times among the top cited and top accessed papers on IEEE and Elsevier databases.

Dr. Erol-Kantarci has received close to $4M funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), National Science Foundation (NSF), Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), MITACS grants and industry grants. She has received the 2020 Distinguished Service Award of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing. Her article “Energy-Efficient Information and Communication Infrastructures in the Smart Grid: A Survey on Interactions and Open Issues” received the 2017 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Award. The award is given each year to one outstanding tutorial paper published in any Communications Society magazine or journal in the previous 5 calendar years. This article is also selected for IEEE ComSoc Best Readings on Green Communications. She is the co-author of the article Wireless Sensor Networks for Cost-Efficient Residential Energy Management in the Smart Grid which is selected to IEEE ComSoc Best Readings on Smart Grid Communications.  

Dr. Erol-Kantarci is the Specialty Chief Editor for the Smart Grid Communications Section of the journal “Frontiers in Communications and Networking”. She is on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Communications Letters, IEEE Networking Letters, IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine and IEEE Access.  She is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM.

Prior to joining University of Ottawa, Dr. Melike Erol-Kantarci was a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clarkson University. Before that she was the coordinator of the Smart Grid Communications Lab and a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Canada. She received the Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Engineering in 2009 and 2004 from Istanbul Technical University. During her Ph.D. studies, she was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the Computer Science Department of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She conducted research on underwater sensor networks. Her PhD thesis study is supervised by Professor Sema Oktug from Istanbul Technical University and Professor Mario Gerla from UCLA. She received the B.Sc. degree from the Department of Control and Computer Engineering of the Istanbul Technical University.

Dr. Erol-Kantarci is the Vice-Chair for IEEE ComSoc emerging technologies initiative on Machine Learning for Communications, Chair of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Machine Learning-Enabled Communication Software and the Chair of SIG on Green Smart Grid Communications.  She was the vice-chair for IEEE Ottawa Section Women in Engineering (WIE) between 2012 and 2014. She has been a general co-chair, TPC co-chair and has held other leading roles for many international conferences including track-chair roles in Globecom, CCNC, VTC, PIMRC and SmartGridComm.

Her main research interests are AI-enabled wireless networks, 5G and 6G, ORAN, smart grid and electric vehicles, cyber-security, wireless sensor networks, wireless energy transfer, underwater sensor networks, mobility modeling and localization.