Dr. Lifeng Lai, assistant professor of systems engineering in UALR’s Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, has received a National Science Foundation grant aimed at making cell phone transmissions more private and secure.

The $400,000, five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty “who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.”

Only 19 percent of the applications for CAREER grants each year are funded.

“In a field of excellent young researchers, Dr. Lai has proved he is competitive with the very best assistant professors in the field of wireless communications,” said Dr. Patrick J. Pellicane, UALR’s vice provost for research and dean of the Graduate School.

“His award acknowledges that UALR is taking its place among the finest research universities in the U.S. and that Arkansas should be thought of as a place where cutting-edge scientific research takes place.”

Lai’s research uses an “information theory-based approach” that capitalizes on the attributes of wireless networks that have been considered troublesome.

“Current security solutions for wireless networks, which are open in the sense that anyone in the transmission range can overhear the communications, have taken a cryptographic approach, which was originally developed for wire-line networks,” Lai said. “Those solutions are based on some mathematical assumptions that are hard to prove. They work now, but they are potentially vulnerable to attack, once hackers find a better way to attack them.”

The approach has attracted much interest in the research community in the last few years.

“The advantage with the information theory-based solutions is that they analytically have been proven to be secure,” Lai said. “However, these solutions have been applied only in a very limited scenario, while the cryptographic solutions are very broad.”

NSF is funding Lai’s work to “bridge between these branches and design schemes to deal with broad scenarios,” as these solutions are proven effective.

Lai is the third UALR faculty member to receive an NSF CAREER Award, joining Dr. John Bush, associate professor of biology and chair of the Biology Department, and Dr. Qingfang He, associate professor of applied science.

“NSF’s decision to give a CAREER Award to Dr. Lai confirms what we already knew – that he is an outstanding young scientist who I predict will make important contributions in his field in the years to come,” said Dr. Mary Good, EIT’s founding dean.