Faculty Profiles

Professor Gonzalez-Prelcic works in signal processing for wireless communication, from the fundamentals of signal processing and wireless communications all the way to their applications in cellular systems for people, vehicles and factories. Her research group has made important contributions in millimeter wave wireless communications, solving fundamental problems related to configuring the hybrid MIMO architectures using signal processing and machine learning techniques. She has also pioneered techniques in integrated sensing and communications including the concepts of sensor-aided communications.

Her current research focuses on wireless communications for next generation cellular systems. Her group is developing new localization techniques that leverage the wireless communication to perform localization. This work enables devices to localize in satellite-denied environments in urban canyons or indoors. Another line of research is on full-duplex for next generation multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications. Her group is developing methods that allow full exploitation of communication and sensing capabilities thanks to full-duplex. Finally, her group is working on communication and radar sensing in the upper midbands, milimeter waves and terahertz frequencies. These spectral frontiers offer higher bandwidths and work with larger arrays, supporting higher data rates and more accurate sensing. She is excited about applications to vehicular systems.

Capsule Bio:

Professor Nuria Gonzalez-Prelcic joined UC San Diego in 2024 as a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2020-2023, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University. From 2002-2020, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at the University of Vigo, Spain. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Vigo in Telecommunication Engineering.

Professor Gonzalez-Prelcic has been developing signal processing theory and its applications ranging from topics such as wavelets and filterbanks to algorithms for advanced communications and sensing. Her group has made important contributions to millimeter wave MIMO communications. She pioneered the idea of sensor-aided wireless communications and joint communication and radar, which has blossomed into the topic of integrated sensing and communications. Her group developed the application of compressive sensing to estimate MIMO wireless communications channels using hybrid analog-digital beamforming architectures.

Her work has been recognized by several awards. Her work on self-attention networks for user tracking received a best student paper award at the 2023 IEEE Signal Processing for Wireless Communications (SPAWC) conference. Her work on joint communication and radar was recognized with the 2022 IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Best Vehicular Electronics Paper Award. Her overview paper on signal processing for millimeter wave MIMO communications was recognized with the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.

She has led several academic centers or programs, many with significant industrial collaborations. She was the co-developer of 6GNC at NC State University, which involved eight companies. She was the Assistant Director of the UT SAVES (Situation-Aware Vehicular Engineering Systems) at UT Austin. She was the Founding Director, atlanTTic Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies, Vigo, Spain. This center involved around 75 faculty members with their PhD students and postdocs. She was the Director of the Research Cluster “Competitiveness: technological progress and business management“, International Campus of Excellence Campus do Mar and the Developer and Founding Director of the Master’s Program SIGMA “Applications of Signal Processing in Communications”, University of Vigo.

Prof. Gonzalez-Prelcic is involved with many efforts in the IEEE. She is an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Sensor, Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (2017 - 2023), an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing for Communications and Networking (SPCOM) Technical Committee (2021-present), an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Integrated Sensing and Communication Technical Working Group, (2021 - present), and a member of the IEEE Communications Society Integrated Sensing and Communication Emerging Technology Initiative (2021 - present). She was a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Education board (2022-2023). She is a Senior Member of the IEEE. She speaks English, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese.

Selected Publications:

Google Scholar Publications