July 23, 2026
Dr. David Bray, Dr. Pierrette Renée Dagg, and Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani to be honored at the 2026 Marconi Awards Gala and Institute Forums
Chicago, IL — The Marconi Society announces the recipients of its inaugural Institute Awards. Dr. David Bray receives the Marconi Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Pierrette Renée Dagg receives the Marconi Award for Leadership in Internet Resilience, and Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani receives the Marconi Award for Innovation in Wireless Communications. All three will be honored at the 2026 Marconi Institute Forums on Thursday, November 5, 2026, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, California.
Nominations for each Institute Award are evaluated against criteria specific to that Institute’s mission, spanning technical innovation, real-world impact, and leadership in building the field’s future. This inaugural class reflects the breadth of that mission: work safeguarding responsible AI deployment, community broadband research, and the wireless standards embedded in billions of devices worldwide.
Marconi Award for Excellence in Artificial Intelligence: Dr. David Bray Dr. David Bray has spent more than two decades translating advanced technology into public benefit at the national scale, from building the CDC’s bioterrorism-response information systems to modernizing 207 legacy IT systems at the FCC onto modern cloud infrastructure. As Executive Director of the People-Centered Internet coalition, chaired by Vint Cerf, and co-chair of IEEE committees on AI standards, he has helped build global frameworks for responsible AI governance well ahead of today’s debates, bridging AI innovation with healthcare, national security, and public policy.
Marconi Award for Leadership in Internet Resilience: Dr. Pierrette Renée Dagg As Director of Research at Merit Network and a research associate at Michigan State University’s Quello Center, Dr. Pierrette Renée Dagg has built the evidence base that turns broadband investment into lasting community resilience, co-authoring frameworks now used to monitor and evaluate policy and documenting the community broadband champions closing connectivity gaps in underserved regions. Her work bridges technical research, policy design, and grassroots practice to ensure Internet infrastructure reaches the communities most at risk of being left offline.
Marconi Award for Innovation in Wireless Communications: Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani’s co-invention of space-time block coding introduced mathematical frameworks that enabled reliable wireless communication over multiple antennas, work that now underlies mobile cellular networks and Wi-Fi standards used by billions of devices worldwide. His subsequent contributions to limited-feedback MIMO and reconfigurable-antenna systems, spanning 52 patents and more than 150 journal articles, continue to shape the technical foundations of next-generation wireless communications.
“The Institute Award recipients have spent a career turning technical depth into benefit that reaches real people in public health systems, in unconnected communities, and in the standards that carry billions of devices online,” said John Janowiak, President and CEO of the Marconi Society.
The 2026 Marconi Awards Gala & Institute Forums will be held November 4-6, 2026, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, California. To inquire about event participation and sponsorship opportunities, contact Flora Tromelin at [email protected] or +1-480-828-6064.
About Merit Network
Merit Network, Inc. is a nonprofit corporation owned and governed by Michigan’s public universities. Merit owns and operates America’s longest-running regional research and education network. In 1966, Michigan’s public universities created Merit as a shared resource to help meet their common need for networking assistance. Since its formation, Merit Network has remained on the forefront of research and education networking expertise and services. Merit provides high-performance networking and IT solutions to Michigan’s public universities, colleges, K-12 organizations, libraries, state government, healthcare, and other non-profit organizations. For more information: www.merit.edu.
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