Hills Elected Senior Member of National Academy of Inventors

EPP Distinguished Service Professor Alex Hills has been elected Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors. The recognition honors his work as a wireless innovator, his 19 related patents, and their commercialization.

Alex’s inventions have resulted in two successful products. One was “Site Scout,” a wireless design tool sold by Helium Networks, Inc. and Skymark, Inc. The other was a second-generation Wi-Fi system sold by Airespace, Inc. and later by Cisco Systems, Inc.

The two wireless products were offshoots of his work leading the team that built “Wireless Andrew,” the world’s first large Wi-Fi network. Previously, Alex spent years living in rural Alaska, where he worked to provide telecommunication services to people in remote Alaskan villages. He worked in more than a hundred small villages across the big state.Alex is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame, and he has been named Alaska’s Engineer of the Year. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by the University of Alaska.