In this episode of The Engagement Ring, I talk with Dr. Dola Saha, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University at Albany, about the wireless technology that keeps us connected — and the research that could help make it faster, more reliable and better equipped for the future. We’ll discuss a new $1.3 million National Science Foundation-funded project that will bring an advanced wireless research testbed to UAlbany, creating new opportunities for interdisciplinary research and collaboration. We’ll also talk about Dr. Saha’s new role as UAlbany’s Provost Fellow for Public Scholarship and how she hopes to help researchers connect their work and expertise with the people and communities who can benefit from it.
Dola Saha, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering, University at Albany
UAlbany Receives $1.3M NSF Award to Establish Advanced Wireless Testbed (Article from UAlbany News by Bethany Bump, June 9, 2026)
College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering
CHRONOS: A Cloud based Hybrid RF-Optical Network Over Synchronous Links
Signal Processing and Communications, University at Albany
Special thanks to Scott Freedman of UAlbany's Digital Media Services Team for engineering the podcast.
The Engagement Ring, Episode 42:
Making Connections — Wireless Research with Public Impact
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from the program.]
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Welcome to The Engagement Ring, your connection to an ever-widening network of higher education professionals, scholars, and community partners working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast...
DOLA SAHA:
Every single application takes a small piece of the large pie, which is a pie of electromagnetic spectrum. Essentially, all the applications will benefit if they have just a bit more of that slice.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
I'll talk with Dr. Dola Saha, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the University at Albany's College of Nanotechnology, Science and Engineering. Dr. Saha's research focuses on something most of us rely on every day, even if we don't think much about or quite understand the technology behind it: wireless communications. She's exploring questions that could help make wireless technologies faster, more reliable, and better able to keep up with our ever-growing demand to stay connected.
DOLA SAHA:
There's always a congestion. How do we do better in terms of whatever spectrum that is given to us? How can we improve our efficiency within that spectrum, as well as how can we coexist with other applications?
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Dr. Saha is leading a new $1.3 million-dollar National Science Foundation-funded project that will bring an advanced wireless research testbed to UAlbany, opening up new possibilities for interdisciplinary research and collaboration. And that interdisciplinary piece is key, because advancing wireless technology requires expertise from many different fields.
DOLA SAHA:
It is a combination of physics, mathematics, as well as electrical computer engineers, environmental engineers, and all of them together, and that's why you will see the testbed is open to all.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
I'll also ask Dr. Saha about her new role as UAlbany's Provost's Fellow for Public Scholarship. Here's my conversation with Dola Saha.
MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the podcast, Dola. It's so nice to have you.
DOLA SAHA:
Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. It's my honor to be here and talking to you.
MARY HUNT:
When people find out that you are a wireless expert, what's the first thing they ask you? I bet they have all sorts of questions.
DOLA SAHA:
That's a good question. So, when they hear wireless expert, they feel like what do I do? Because they have cell phones. They get connection everywhere they go. So why am I still working on wireless? So, I have to remind them that well, remember like when like ‘80s ‘90s, we used to have cell phones, which were like really huge, and some of us are old enough to remember like 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G. Right now, we have 5G. We were able to just send few texts previously, just voice call, then just a few texts, and now we can do video calls. So, what's next? And that's what we are trying to fundamentally answer this question: How can we improve what we have? And that's my research.
MARY HUNT:
You work in a field where I think most people don't think about it because it's an invisible technology.
DOLA SAHA:
Agreed.
MARY HUNT:
It's something they just expect to work, so they don't think about it till it goes wrong, or something doesn't work, or it’s not there for them.
DOLA SAHA:
I totally agree, and that's where I kind of want to bring in a term that we call as a jargon. We call it electromagnetic spectrum, but I want to explain that as well. Like, what is electromagnetic spectrum, and how do we use it for wireless communication and sensing? So, you can think of electromagnetic spectrum as like a really large, extra-large piano, where you have the low tones coming out from the left side and then very high tones coming out from the right side, Electromagnetic spectrum is something like that, where frequencies are either in radio waves, which are which are very lower frequencies. Then there are microwaves that are a bit higher, and then we have visible light, which is even higher. Basically, the lights that are here that we can see, those are also electromagnetic waves, and even higher than that, the frequencies higher than that are x-rays, gamma rays, and all of that. So, there's a huge amount of frequencies that are available to us, and all together is electromagnetic spectrum, and we use electromagnetic spectrum for many, many things. For example, when we wake up in the morning, we use our cell phone. We connect to the cell towers when we are outside. We, or even in our home, we use Wi-Fi. We use microwave for heating our food. We use… the airports use the baggages and we walk through them for all the security. So that so that is already we are using electromagnetic spectrum to do that. Then GPS — I cannot even think about not using GPS and going to a to a new place. Think about the police radar.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah.
DOLA SAHA:
So that uses electromagnetic spectrum. Think about weather radar. Every single morning I wake up and say what's the weather? Is it going to rain? That we get using electromagnetic spectrum.
MARY HUNT:
Where did your interest come from in wireless technology?
DOLA SAHA:
So I was doing my undergrad, and I was taking different courses, and all of them were so intriguing, so new, and wonderful. And then I got a chance to do undergraduate research in this domain, wireless communication networking, and that essentially triggered my interest in this field. And then after that, it just kept going. I just, I just became a part of it. I cannot think of it…
MARY HUNT:
Very natural, very natural progression.
DOLA SAHA:
Yes. Yes.
MARY HUNT:
it's interesting. And you started… you earned your undergraduate degree. I understand you graduated first in your class from Kalyani University in India, and then you came over to the University of Colorado Boulder to do your graduate work. What was that transition like in terms of your research, your research interests, or processes, or how you started to look at a career in that field?
DOLA SAHA:
Yeah, that's a good question. So after my undergrad, I spent two years in a research project, which exposed me to research, and I'm so grateful for that experience because that kind of shaped who I am today. After that, the two years span… the research project was over, so I said that well, let me go and work in the industry. So I started working in the industry, and eventually I felt like the work became very repetitive. So that's when I realized that I want to do research for which I need to do… I need to get a PhD, and that's when I applied for grad school, and then I started my PhD.
MARY HUNT:
And you've worked in some impressive places. You worked in the Jet Propulsion Lab. Is that correct?
DOLA SAHA:
Yes. Yes. That was that was a summer fellow in JPL in Pasadena, California. Yeah, it's wonderful to work there, and there are so many different things on communication sides that we don't normally see or talk because we are now talking about deep space network. We are not talking about our cell phone towers anymore. So it's much farther away.
MARY HUNT:
So let's fast forward to today. You're here at the University of Albany and back to the electromagnetic spectrum. You recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation for one $1.3 million to continue your work. Can you tell us a little bit about what does the grant fund and what problem are you trying to address through the grant?
DOLA SAHA:
Sure. The grant is basically to fund the test bed, a wireless testbed that we are going to establish in the downtown campus. The testbed will be able to transmit and receive in all different frequencies, very low frequencies like radio frequencies, and then also in microwave frequencies, then as well as sub-terahertz frequencies, which are very high frequencies, and this is going to help us do research in all of those frequencies, moving around in those frequencies whenever required. Also, how to utilize the spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum. And to talk a bit more about the spectrum. It's basically a constant resource. It's a resource that we all use. All the applications that I was talking of, every single application takes a small piece of the large pie, which is a pie of electromagnetic spectrum. Essentially, all the applications will benefit if they have just a bit more of that slice. So now, it's a constant resource. So there is always a congestion. And how do we do better in terms of doing whatever spectrum that is given to us? How can we improve our efficiency within that spectrum, as well as how can we coexist with other applications? So, these are some of the research questions that we can answer, and some of a lot of these works we are doing have been theoretical, and now the testbed will actually help us to move towards experimental research on these several topics,
MARY HUNT:
We already have a lab. Is that correct? Called Chronos, and this will actually expand the capacities of CHRONOS?
DOLA SAHA:
So, CHRONOS is not the lab. So, CHRONOS was another funded testbed by NSF. It was, I think, about five years ago we got funding for CHRONOS. We established the lab where we have testbed for radio frequencies lower than six gigahertz, as well as invisible light communication, so visible light frequencies. And now we will add the CHRONOS with this one, which we call as INSPECT, so we are going to merge these two so that we have the full frequency, full span of all the frequencies.
MARY HUNT:
And again, I understand that this is open to other researchers as well. So why… It was pretty unselfish. Why did you prepare a grant that wasn't just for your research but opened up opportunities for others as well?
DOLA SAHA:
I believe in collaboration. Collaboration brings in better research. So, if we have a $1.3 million testbed sitting in UAlbany, where only few researchers are going to just use it, I think that's a waste of resource, money, funds, everything. We can do so much better if we can collaborate with anyone around the Capital Region who wants to come over and do the experiments with us. We are definitely open to that.
MARY HUNT:
Who might? Is it other academics? Is it business? Industry?
DOLA SAHA:
Yes. So mostly academics because this is very early on. It's not ready for business at all, I would say. So faculty from, let's say, RPI can come over. There are a couple of faculty from Union College who were interested, and then a couple of faculty from SUNY Poly in Utica, so there are other schools around who will be interested.
MARY HUNT:
In the past, you've said your work has been largely theoretical. So specifically, how has your work contributed to the development of new technologies or improvements in wireless? I know you. Your work has had an impact on research and applications for like telesurgery, virtual reality. Can you talk a little bit about that?
DOLA SAHA:
Sure. So I would say that it's not very theoretical. So I have done a lot of experimental research as well, but some of them, like in sub-terahertz, some of them were also theoretical. I do have a testbed that I have always worked on before as well, but this testbed is going to improve the capacity much more, and that kind of relates to when you say tele surgery or virtual reality. I directly do not work with telesurgery. I directly do not work with virtual reality. I work with wireless communication. And if we can improve the wireless communication capability, the data rate in a way, then we will be able to do better those applications. So that's basically the link that I'm trying to portray. That the fundamental research that I'm doing that will someday enable something for the community, the society, which is not a direct impact. It's not like it's not going to happen in five days, five months. It might happen in five years. So that's the wait time that we are going to do for the fundamental research.
MARY HUNT:
So, yeah, in layman's terms, I mean, how would you describe the work that you're doing is going to impact people's lives in what way?
DOLA SAHA:
That's a very good question. So sometimes, so I see the research… Any research can be categorized into two different categories. One is application-driven or need-driven. The other one is fundamental research, where we are trying to pursue human curiosity, whether we can push the boundaries where we know are today. And oftentimes you will see that the disruptive technologies actually come from the fundamental research. For example, think about internet. It started with just ARPANET, basically, four computers needed to be connected for a military application. And if you had asked this question to one of the scientists working at that time, what is the impact that this connectivity can bring into people. They wouldn't have told you, "Oh, you will have a social network that people cannot get off of, or you cannot keep your phone away and not look at your email.” Right. So, so they wouldn't have thought about or could predict that. But these fundamental changes are so important that we often can show one or two of these applications. But if we can push the fundamental boundaries, the other applications will show up. They will be able to see much benefit of that. One part of my research is improving the communication, wireless communication. The other part is coexistence. So, what is coexistence? As I was talking about different applications, each application is trying to get part of the spectrum. How can two different applications use the same part of the spectrum without interfering with each other? That's another part of my research that I also work on. And in that sense, I work with radio astronomers. Now, what is radio astronomy? It is again another application that uses electromagnetic spectrum. We know that there are a lot of things that we can see in the sky at night, and that uses basically optical signals. So basically, optical waves come to our eyes and we see those. Radio frequencies are the ones that we cannot see, but there are galaxies that emit, or some of them, cosmic ones, they emit radio frequencies which travel from very, very far away, and they come to Earth, and they are extremely faint energy, and we have to detect them if we want to listen to what has happened billions of years ago. Why billions of years ago? Because think about the moon. The moon is about what few seconds away if the electromagnetic waves propagate in light speed. But some of these galaxies are billions of years ago. So whatever they have emitted at that time, huge amount of energy that is coming to us, and we are basically experiencing history by looking at these radio waves using the radio telescopes. Now these signals that are coming that are very, very weak, and any of the signal from the cell tower or the minimalistic signal from our phones, cell phones, they can interfere, and that's one of the ways that I'm trying to work on is how do we cancel this interference and still be able to listen to these cosmic waves. So that's the coexistence part of the of the research. So, I don't work with directly with the community, but some other community of researchers who are not wireless communication, but they are radio astronomers. I work with them.
MARY HUNT:
Which brings up the point of this interdisciplinary collaboration — how important that is to these discoveries and to this, you know, just to the study and the research that you're doing. We cannot have tunnel vision. These things are all related.
DOLA SAHA:
Absolutely. So, without collaboration and without interdisciplinary collaboration, it's just impossible. So, when I talked about different applications of electromagnetic spectrum, starting from GPS to microwave, to heating our food, right. That is not all done, or even weather radar or police radar, that is not all done by one discipline or one scientist. It is a combination of physics, mathematics, as well as electrical computer engineers, environmental engineers, and all of them together, and that's why it is extremely important to combine all of these together, and that's why you will see the testbed is open to all. Some of the physicists would like to use the testbed to see if they can do something better in terms of detecting something hidden. So, that's another aspect of it.
MARY HUNT:
Interesting. I'm going to throw a few phrases at you for, as I say, the uninitiated. So, just briefly, if you can help us understand the difference between some of these, some of the listeners may may very well know these. Others may not, but I know a lot of us use them interchangeably. You talked about the electronic or electromagnetic spectrum… web and internet. What's the difference?
DOLA SAHA:
Web and internet are very similar. I would say. We use like we use the term web and internet very similarly. Internet is basically a connect a collection of nodes or computers that are connected with each other. So there are billions of computers that are all connected to each other, and that's networking. Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
How about wireless?
DOLA SAHA:
So wireless is all how electromagnetic waves propagate, and when we say propagate, what that means is if you can think of like if you throw a stone in a pond you will see ripples go around all over all around the place, so that is basically water going-not water actually going, but the energy is changing. Similarly, for electromagnetic waves, there are two fields: one is electric field, and one is magnetic field. One goes side to side; the other one goes top to bottom, and together they move forward. So electromagnetic waves are the ones which carry information, and they are the ones that ultimately take information from my cell phone to a cell tower. The same electromagnetic waves we use for radar, for example, the police radar, we send a very short signal, and that signal propagates and gets reflected and we listen to the reflection, and we can look at the reflection, and we can say, "Oh, that car is going faster, or “the clouds are really heavy, it’s going to rain.” So, so those are some of the things that we used to do using the electromagnetic spectrum.
MARY HUNT:
How about broadband and Wi-Fi? Are they the same thing?
DOLA SAHA:
I would say broadband is basically broad, like carrying more data bandwidth connection, and it can be a cellular connection as well. Wi-Fi is specifically wireless Wi-Fi protocol which we use as Wi-Fi routers in our homes. In in the university, we have UAlbany that we connect to Wi-Fi. That's Wi-Fi. That's very specific to Wi-Fi.
MARY HUNT:
You know all these ideas, these notions of 4G and 5G, and I don't think there's a 6G quite yet, is there? But what does that mean?
DOLA SAHA:
So basically, these are called G is generation. So 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, and now we are 5G. These are generations of connections or wireless connections. Every single generation, there is a major improvement. So from 3G to 4G, there was a huge jump. From 4G to 5G, there was a huge jump. We use a lot of new frequencies. We can support even more data rate. We can do video calls from anywhere. So these are the different generations of cellular networks. What I work on, we call it next generation. We don't even try to put a number to that because it's so difficult sometimes.
MARY HUNT:
What do you think this funding and this expansion of your work will allow you to do that you can't do now?
DOLA SAHA:
So there are a lot of work that can happen only in experiments. So, we can do a lot of work in theory. We can make some assumptions, but oftentimes when we actually transmit and receive using actual hardware, we notice different issues, different things, and those are the challenges and the problems that we will face when we actually try to take the theory and make it into practice.
MARY HUNT:
So, what do you think people will notice that's different, though? Ultimately, and as you say, it's not going to be tomorrow or next month. These things sometimes take years and take time. But what can you envision will improve, or technologies that might become available?
DOLA SAHA:
So, some of the applications that normally people talk about is AR VR or networked virtual reality. So virtual reality is already there. So things are already stored, located, and everything. But think about networked virtual reality. So why is it different from regular virtual reality? Which has a lot to deal with the latency.
MARY HUNT:
Latency being?
DOLA SAHA:
The time that it takes to load the information in in the headset. What is network virtual reality? So think about it that U.S. Open is happening somewhere in in New York City, and we are sitting here. We are wearing a headset, VR headset, and we want to watch that is happening in New York City. Now the signal has to come from all the way from there up to us through different networks. First stop may be wireless, and then a lot may be through the internet, and there is a time lag. Now, if we move our head in wearing a virtual reality headset, and the scene doesn't move properly within real time within less than 10 milliseconds, then we get vertigo, so it is extremely important to reduce that latency. So some of these can be actually enabled if we have a really reliable and robust wireless communication system.
MARY HUNT:
Interesting things you'd never think of, and you must be a tennis fan. You mentioned the U.S. Open. Are you?
[Laughter]
DOLA SAHA:
Not much though.
MARY HUNT:
Is there one wireless technology that sounds maybe like science fiction today that you could see becoming reality in the future?
DOLA SAHA:
So I think, I like to show pictures when I talk to kids in schools. I like to show holographic video, like just like Star Wars.
MARY HUNT:
Yep.
[Laughter]
DOLA SAHA:
So that's what I think is possible. It's just the bandwidth that we don't have now, and we are working on that. I hope that we will be able to reach that very soon.
MARY HUNT:
When you say very soon, I know you can't put a time limit on it. But what are you talking? Are you talking one year, two years, 10 years, 50 years down the road? What is soon in science?
DOLA SAHA:
Five.
MARY HUNT:
Okay. Okay.
DOLA SAHA:
Yeah.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah. Wow.
DOLA SAHA:
We are moving very fast. 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, we were pretty slow, but now I think the technology is moving very, very fast.
MARY HUNT:
AI is on everyone's mind these days. What role do you think AI will play in all of this, or plays in your work now? And do you see it sort of evolving to play? Will it change the way wireless networks work, or we approach them.
DOLA SAHA:
Yes, so we do a lot of work, I would say majority of my work is now utilizing machine learning and AI in a way that has to be curated or very much modified for wireless applications, because as I was mentioning, some of these communications the time duration has to be less than millisecond, less than 10 milliseconds, which is extremely slow for many of the AI scenarios like AI models. If you think of large language models, they cannot do as fast. So what we do is we design specific models which are smaller-size models. We use different ways to actually reduce the power of the model, energy consumption of the model, so that they can fit in our small devices, like mobile devices. So, definitely, these are already playing a huge role in our wireless communication.
MARY HUNT:
What's your favorite wireless device? What are you most reliant on?
DOLA SAHA:
My iPhone and my MacBook.
[Laughter]
MARY HUNT:
Oh, okay. Yeah… can't argue with that. You also have another role at UAlbany. You have been named the Provost Fellow for Public Scholarship. What does that mean, and what does your new role entail?
DOLA SAHA:
Sure. So, in this new role, my job is to advocate for public research and how faculty can talk about their own research to public. To give you just a bit background on how I got interested in this whole setup, as after the conversation, I think you already know that I'm not a person who does public engage research because that is a bit different. That is already public in the loop for research. I don't do that kind of research. My research is a bit more fundamental. I'm trying to answer some of these questions, which will help in future. But I was very fortunate to do one of the SUNY Leadership Academies, where we were trained by Alan Alda Center for Communications, and basically it opened my mind in terms of how I can speak for my own research in a way that everybody understands, and I want to bring that learning and essence to our faculty. So what I'm doing right now in this role is doing multiple workshops. In each workshop, I'm training faculty to talk based on few initial things in their mind, so they need to think about who is the audience who I'm speaking to and based on that they can modify their way of talking or speaking about their research. And then, ultimate goal for these workshops is to create about three to four sentences on public impact research, so their own research statement, but without any technical jargon, so that everybody else can understand every person, whether they are a schoolteacher, or whether they are a policymaker or an undergrad starting to figure out what they would like to do. So that's the overall goal for this workshop, so that they can write that.
MARY HUNT:
And public impact research being as you said, there might be scientists who are doing fundamental research, and there might be scientists who are doing applied research, working in the community with a community partner, but it all has a public impact. It's all done with public good in mind. So there is a positive outcome,
DOLA SAHA:
Absolutely.
MARY HUNT:
And as a public research university, that's so much at the foundation of what we're doing and what we hope our faculty are involved in.
DOLA SAHA:
Absolutely, and my goal has always been to try to help the faculty who are doing fundamental research to think about how to explain that there is a connection to the impact that they are making. They might not have thought that, and that's the part of the workshop that I try to help them to connect the dots, what they are doing in their lab versus what that can help in 5 to 10 years down the line,
MARY HUNT:
Scientists are so incredibly good at solving problems and some very challenging problems. Why do they have difficulty communicating about their work?
DOLA SAHA:
Well, we are not trained for that. We have never been trained to communicate our research or technical problems. From very beginning, we do undergraduate, then we do PhD, graduation, and all of these times. And then we become faculty. All these times, we write difficult technical problems, solve technical problems, write academic papers, and go publish and talk to people who understand those technical jargons. We are not trained for this, so that's why it's very difficult. And now we are trying to reflect back. It's not what we are trained, but we can do it.
MARY HUNT:
Do you think scientists, academics have a responsibility to be able to communicate that science to the?
DOLA SAHA:
It is very important. It's very important. I think it's very important because we are a public institute, and what public institute means that we are responsible to talk about our research in a way that it makes an impact to the public. If we don't speak, no one knows whether what we are doing is useful or not. So we do need to do that.
MARY HUNT:
I had the pleasure — and fun — of sitting in on a session from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating About Science, and it was fun. It was interesting the way they tried to get us to think about our audience and how to communicate something complex to an audience that may not have had the background or the training in that field.
DOLA SAHA:
Like all the faculty there that we attended together, we are all at least mid-career faculty, or some are even full professors there So we all have done some outreach, some community engagement in some form, and we have all we have all thought about different ways of speaking. It's not that it is completely new. However, what they have done is made it a very methodical way. Like, how do you think? Think about X first, then go to Y, and then go to Z. So every single thing is wired in a proper way, so that now, if I want to do it, it won't be in my subconscious mind. I will actually, be able to write down what I'm going to do. Who is my audience? How am I going to talk to them? What do they care about? And all of these will reflect when I'm talking to those audience.
MARY HUNT:
I recall the point being driven home that you have to talk to the audience so about what they care about, why it's important to them, what they care about, and you have to make that connection.
DOLA SAHA:
Yes.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I know the Alda Center is down at Stony Brook, and Alan Alda obviously is involved and is a terrific communicator and very interested and knowledgeable about science.
DOLA SAHA:
Yes, yes, we saw his video. He joined us over videos.
MARY HUNT:
Oh, he did?
DOLA SAHA:
Yes,
MARY HUNT:
Yeah. He is. He's terrific.
DOLA SAHA:
He'samazing.
MARY HUNT:
Really amazing. What is N2Women?
DOLA SAHA:
So N2Women is Networking Networking Women. This is a professional organization. We are supported by professional ACM and IEEE organizations.
MARY HUNT:
Which is? Explain what those two acronyms for us.
DOLA SAHA:
Those are professional organizations in our field.
MARY HUNT:
In engineering in engineering and computer science?
DOLA SAHA:
Yes, and N2Women is basically Networking Networking Women. There are two networking. One network, the first network, I’d say, is for networking, which we do technical networks. I work in wireless communication. Then there are other people who want who work on actual wired communication. But ultimately, when we connect with people, there is actual network that happens. So there is we work on wireless network.
MARY HUNT:
That name is clever.
DOLA SAHA:
Yeah, and then the network. Yes. So, there are two parts of these networking, networking women, and it was it was established by Tracy Camp from University Colorado School of Mines and WendI Heinzelman from University of Rochester. So they started this realizing that well, there are only few women in this field. So how can we help them? So percentagewise, it's less than 10% or very close to 10% I would say. So if that is the case, how can we help to retain these women in this field? And that initially started with that, and then now we have grown so much. This is all voluntary. Everything voluntary. So we have multiple events that we do in every single conference in networking field, and then we have a full-day workshop, multiple of those with two or three different conferences that we have, and then we have funding. We ourselves don't handle any of the actual funds, but we have funding through different organizations. Again, ACM is one of the organizations that we get funding from. Google is another where we get funding from, and we use this funding to support these workshops, mostly in form of travel grants to the students. And the students come in, and then they spend the whole day in the workshops. The workshop is mostly designed for professional development to help them connect, to help them talk about their research to let them know the field. Like a student, a PhD student who just starts in their in their lab, they don't know how an industry life is, how an industry lab works. So there are mentors that we have. We try to connect the mentors with the students, and we have a huge amount of volunteers that work on these to do what we are doing today.
MARY HUNT;
Why do you think there's so few women in the field?
DOLA SAHA:
Well, it's a pipeline problem, so I think there is an issue, and we need to go back to the sixth grade level, middle school level, where the kids are thinking about what they want to do, and it's at that time that they probably don't see enough women in this field, and they feel like well, maybe something else they will do, and they kind of move away from that. So the incoming pool, if we if we look at the undergraduate number of undergraduate women in undergraduate class in ECE department or any engineering, you will see it's like in teens or like very low, and that has been a case for a very long time. And that's why I think mentoring is very important. Role models are important. I like to go to the schools and talk whenever I get a chance. There are career days in local schools that I go. They need to see that there are women engineers as well. It's not all men. So, yeah…
MARY HUNT:
If you looked back, say in 20 years, what would you like to see as a result of the work that you've been doing? What would you look back and say, "Oh, that was valuable. We accomplished something big.”
DOLA SAHA:
So 20 years ago, I still remember the phones were like really big and clunky and heavy, and you could only probably just talk or maybe just type in and… remember the day's BlackBerry, the phones.
MARY HUNT:
Yes.
DOLAR SAHA:
So we did a lot of research, not just wireless communication research, but also hardware development and all of these to make what we have today, where we use all the modern-day smartphones, smartwatch, and whatnot, this is this has been a good thing that has happened to humanity.
MARY HUNT:
Yeah… can you envision anything in the future? I guess you talked about, ah, what is the Star Wars… holographic?
DOLA SAHA:
Holographic video.
MARY HUNT:
What would holograph video be used for? How would you envision that actually being used by regular people?
DOLA SAHA:
Well, when I go to middle school or high school students, I tell them like, in the evening when you sit down and in your sofa to watch a TV, or when you are playing your video game, wouldn't it be nice if you felt like your friend is sitting just beside you, and holographic video like that would give you a feeling of that. So that's what I envision.
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MARY HUNT:
Wow, that is interesting. Well, thank you, Dola, for sharing your ideas and your inspiration and what drives you and kind of helping us through some of this information that is a little challenging for laymen to understand. But thanks for making it more accessible.
DOLA SAHA:
Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much.
MARY HUNT:
Always so nice to have a chance to talk with you. I hope you'll come back again.
DOLA SAHA:
Absolutely, any time. Thank you.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Dola Saha is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University at Albany's College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering. Professor Saha's research focuses on improving wireless systems so they can send, receive, and interpret signals more reliably, even in challenging environments. Her work enables applications like remote surgery and networked virtual reality and protects scientific instruments such as radio telescopes from harmful interference. For more information on Dr. Saha's work, visit the resource page for this podcast at the engagement dash ring dot Simplecast dot com. The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. Special thanks to our recording engineer Scott Freedman of UAlbany's Digital Media Services. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at Albany dot E D U.
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