Professor Sabharwal is the Earnest D. Butcher Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Sabharwal received his B.Tech in 1993 from IIT, New Delhi, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1995 and 1999, respectively. He currently works in two research areas. His first area of research is wireless, where his research spans fundamental theory and experimental systems. He is the founder of WARP project, an open-source project which is now in use at more than 125 research groups worldwide, and has been used by more than 500 research articles. He also led RENEW, an NSF PAWR project, that developed world’s first open-source massive MIMO platform for a deployed city-scale national wireless testbed. He led the wireless networks thrust in the ARL-Rice Center for advanced materials and networks. He is currently leading NSF-funded Houdini project (houdini-sdr.org). He was a co-inventor of full-duplex wireless, which has been adopted in communications standards.
His second area of research area is digital health. His digital health research focus is the development of devices and data science to quantify behavior-biology pathways across many diseases. He leads the Rice Digital Health Initiative and is the co-director of the Methodist-Rice Digital Health Institute. He co-founded Cognita Labs, which has developed multiple FDA-cleared medical devices. He was the PI of “See Below the Skin” for a non-invasive bio-imaging multi-university effort, and is co-PI on the NSF Engineering Research Center, PATHS-UP that is developing cost-effective personalized technologies. His research has led to multiple commercial spinoffs. His research is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), Army Research Labs (ARL), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Facebook.
He was awarded the 2017 IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Award, the 2018 IEEE Advances in Communications Award, the 2019, 2021 and 2025 ACM Test-of-time Awards, the 2019 ACM MobiCom Community Contribution Award, and the 2023 ICC Best Paper Award. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and the National Academy of Inventors.