Advisory Committee

Fatemeh Afghah is a McQueen Quattlebaum Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University and the Director of the Intelligent Systems and Wireless Networking (IS-WiN) Laboratory. She also holds a joint appointment at Savannah River National Laboratory. Her research spans wireless communication networks, multi-agent decision-making, UAV networks, and vision-language foundation models, with a recent focus on autonomous decision-making under uncertainty for disaster response and extreme environments.

 

Her research has been supported by over $20M in total funding from NSF, AFRL, DEVCOM, AFOSR, NASA, and NIH. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the N²Women Star in Computer Networking and Communications (2025), 100 Brilliant and Inspiring Women in 6G™ List for 2026, the McQueen Quattlebaum Award at Clemson University (2025), the AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2019), the NSF CAREER Award (2020), NAU’s Most Promising New Scholar Award (2020), the NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award (2017), and Best Paper Awards at IEEE Asilomar (2025) and IEEE INFOCOM WiSRAN (2022).

 

Dr. Afghah is the author or co-author of over 180 peer-reviewed publications and six U.S. patents. She has served as an Associate Editor for several journals, including ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, Computer Networks, Elsevier Journal of Network and Computer Applications, IEEE Communications Letters, and Ad Hoc Networks. She has also played leading roles in organizing major international conferences and workshops at the intersection of communications, AI, and cyber-physical systems, including IEEE GLOBECOM Cognitive Radio and AI-Enabled Networks Symposium (2026), IEEE ICC Aerial Communications Track (2025), IEEE VTC-Fall 6G and Emerging Technologies (2026), the NSF CPS PI Meeting (2025), IEEE INFOCOM WiSRAN (2019), and the NSF Smart Health PI Workshop on “Smart Health in the AI and COVID Era” (2021).

Jon C. Calhoun (Senior Member, IEEE) received a B.S. in Computer Science from Arkansas State University in 2012, a B.S. in Mathematics with a minor in Statistics from Arkansas State University in 2012, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. He directs the Future Technologies in Heterogeneous and Parallel Computing Laboratory, whose primary efforts are dedicated to the development and integration of lossy and lossless data compression algorithms inside scientific and AI/ML workflows to remove key data generation, movement, and storage bottlenecks. In addition, his group advances high-performance computing education and improves the reliability, scalability, and performance of large-scale parallel scientific software.

 

In recognition of his accomplishments and service to Arkansas State University, Dr. Calhoun was elected into the Arkansas TRIO program Hall of Fame in 2013 and the College of Engineering and Computer Science Alumni Academy in 2022. While at Clemson, he was awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER award in 2020, an R&D 100 award in 2021 for his work on the SZ lossy compressor framework, the 2022 College of Engineering, Computing, and Applied Sciences (CECAS) Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the 2024 CECAS Junior Faculty Research of the Year.