Steven McLaughlin
Provost/Executive Vice President-Academic Affairs
Biography

Steven W. McLaughlin is the provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

McLaughlin first joined Georgia Tech as a member of the faculty in 1996. From 2017-2020, he served as the dean and Southern Company Chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, the largest engineering college in the country. Prior roles include the Steve Chaddick School Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2012-2017, and the vice provost for International Initiatives and Steven A. Denning Chair in Global Engagement from 2007-2012.

In 2014 he co-founded CREATE-X, a campus-wide effort to instill entrepreneurial confidence in students and help them launch companies. The program has successfully launched 225 student-led companies and engaged more than 4,000 students in the principles and practice of evidence-based entrepreneurship.

In 2011 he was awarded the honor Chevalier dans l`Ordre Nationale de Merite, (Knight of the French National Order of Merit), the second highest civilian award given by Republic of France. He was the first Georgia Tech recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) where he was cited by President Clinton "for leadership in the development of high-capacity, nonbinary optical recording formats." He is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

His research interests are in the general area of communications and information theory. His research group has published in the areas of forward error correction and equalization in wireless communications, magnetic/optical data storage, data security, and privacy. He has advised more than 50 students and postdocs. His group has published more than 250 papers in journals and conferences and holds 36 U.S. patents.

He received the B.S.E.E. degree from Northwestern University, the M.S.E. degree from Princeton University, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan.

Research
  • Communications and information theory
  • Error control coding: iterative decoding, turbo codes, graphical codes
  • Coding and signal processing for magnetic/optical storage and fiber optic transmission systems
  • Quantum key distribution
Distinctions & Awards
  • Chevalier dans l'Ordre National du Mérite, (Knight of the National Order of Merit), given by the President of the Republic of France (2011)
  • President, IEEE Information Theory Society (2005)
  • National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
  • NSF Career Award
  • NSF Research Initiation Award
  • Technical Achievement Award, Information Storage Industries Consortium, INSIC
  • Georgia Tech Graduate Student Association "Friend of the Graduate Student Award"
Publications
  • C.R. Forest, R. Sivakumar, R.P. Vito, R. Saxena, J. Harris, R. Perkins, D. Davidson, K. Ramachandran, K. McGreggor, O. Olufisayo, C. Klaus, S.W. Mclaughlin, CREATE-X: Transforming a university culture towards student entrepreneurial confidence, IEEE Potentials, pp. 14-22, May/June 2021.
  • F. Fekri, S.W. McLaughlin, R.M. Mersereau, R.W. Schafer: "Rate 1/L Block Codes Using Finite Field Wavelet Transforms; A New Class of Maximum Distance Separable Codes and more," in Proc. Conf. on Information Sciences and Systems, Princeton, NJ, March 15-17, 2000.
  • F. Fekri, S.W. McLaughlin, R.M. Mersereau, R.W. Schafer: "Double Circulant Self-Dual Codes Using Finite Field Wavelet Transforms," Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS); Applied Algebra, Algebraic Algorithms and Error-Correcting Codes, pp. 355-364, 1999.
  • L. McPheters K. Narayanan, and S.W. McLaughlin, "Precoded PRML, serial concatenation and iterative (turbo) decoding,'' IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 2325-2328, September 1999.
  • F. Fekri, S.W. McLaughlin, R.M. Mersereau, R.W. Schafer: "Error Control Coding Using Finite Field Wavelet Transforms: Double Circulant Codes," submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1999.
  • F. Fekri, S.W. McLaughlin, R.M. Mersereau, R.W. Schafer: "Convolutional Coding Using Finite Field Wavelet Transforms," to appear in Proc. of the Thirty-Eighth Annual Allerton Conference.
  • S, Verdu and S. McLaughlin, Information Theory: 50 Years of Discovery (IEEE Press, 1999).
  • S.W. McLaughlin, "Shedding light on the future of optical recording," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Signal Processing for Digital Recording, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 83-94, July1998.
  • Steven W. McLaughlin, O. Milenkovic, B.V. Vasic: "Channel Capacity of M-ary Redundant Multitrack Runlength Limited Codes," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 766-774, 1998.
  • Steven W. McLaughlin, L. McPheters, W. Ryan: "Turbo Coding and Equalization for PR4 Equalized Lorentzian Channels," Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, Princeton, NJ, 1998.
  • Steven W. McLaughlin, O. Milenkovic, B.V. Vasic: "Power Spectral Density of Multitrack (0,G/I) Codes," Electronic Letters, vol. 33, no. 9, pp. 784-786, 1997.
  • Steven W. McLaughlin: "Runlength Limited Code for Multilevel Data," twelve separate patents issued by ETOM Technologies, Inc. from August-October 1997, 1997.
  • S.W. McLaughlin, "The construction of M-ary codes that achieve capacity and have the fewest number of encoder states," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 699-703, March 1997.
  • R. Cloke, P. Lee, Steven W. McLaughlin: "Codes for Improved Timing Recovery in PR4 and EPR4 Magnetic Recording," Proceedings of Globecom 1997, CD-ROM, session 35, no. 1, Phoenix, AZ, no. 1, 1997.