The McDowell Award is given to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other similar innovative contribution that falls within the scope of IEEE Computer Society interest. Dr. Akyildiz is being honored by the Society "for pioneering contributions to wireless sensor network architectures and communication protocols" and will receive this accolade at an awards dinner to be held on May 25 in Albuquerque, N.M. during the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors Meeting.

Dr. Akyildiz is the Byers Professor in Telecommunications in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech and is the director of the Broadband and Wireless Networking Lab. Currently, he serves as the chair of the School's telecommunications technical interest group. Dr. Akyildiz has received numerous technical accolades from IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery. He has also been honored by Georgia Tech and ECE for his student advisement, junior faculty mentorship, and scholarly publications.