ECE Alumnus Henning Schulzrinne Receives 2026 IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award

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Henning Schulzrinne ’92PhD, an alumnus of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the 2026 IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award, the highest honor presented by the INFOCOM community for contributions to networking technologies and systems.

Schulzrinne, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Mathematical Methods and Computer Science and a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, was honored “for outstanding contributions to the design of protocols, applications, and algorithms for Internet multimedia.”

His research helped lay the technological groundwork for Voice over Internet Protocol, multimedia streaming, videoconferencing, and other forms of real-time internet communication. Schulzrinne was a lead developer of the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the internet standards at the center of that transformation.

“It’s so great to see Henning receive this career honor,” said Jim Kurose, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UMass Amherst and one of Schulzrinne’s doctoral advisors. “His research on the design of protocols, applications, and algorithms for internet multimedia put him at the very forefront of the internet multimedia revolution; his work on the internet-standard Real-Time Transport Protocol and Session Initiation Protocol means his innovations are running on literally billions of devices today.” Kurose added that Schulzrinne’s interest in real-time communications began during his doctoral research at UMass Amherst, where he studied multimedia communication under Kurose and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Don Towsley.

In the early 1990s, Schulzrinne helped develop RTP as a common method for transporting audio and video over the internet. The protocol introduced mechanisms for media timing, quality feedback, scalability, and the separation of control and data, and today underpins major videoconferencing, internet telephony, and streaming applications.

Schulzrinne later led development of SIP, a signaling protocol that allows internet-based communication sessions to be initiated, managed, and ended across different devices and services. SIP has since been widely adopted in internet telephone systems, cellular networks, emergency communications infrastructure, and videoconferencing platforms.

Schulzrinne’s contributions also include the Real-Time Streaming Protocol, which provides controls for delivering audio and video streams, along with research spanning internet telephony, adaptive audio, network mobility, cybersecurity, and the Internet of Things. That body of work has produced hundreds of academic publications and internet standards documents, along with dozens of patents.

In addition to his academic research, Schulzrinne has made significant contributions to federal technology and telecommunications policy. He twice served as chief technology officer of the Federal Communications Commission and held several other advisory and engineering roles at the agency, where his work addressed next-generation 911 systems, broadband performance, accessibility for people with hearing and speech disabilities, robocall prevention, and the transition from traditional telephone networks to internet-based systems.

“I’d also give a big shout-out to Henning for his government service work, including serving twice as the chief technology officer for the Federal Communications Commission,” Kurose said. “It’s the rare person who excels in research while at the same time contributing to the nation through such high-level national service.”

Schulzrinne has also served as a technology fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and as a broadband advisor to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, supporting efforts to expand broadband access in rural and low-income communities.

Schulzrinne earned his PhD in electrical engineering from UMass Amherst in 1992 and joined the Columbia Engineering faculty in 1996. He is a fellow of both IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery.