The doctoral degree, i.e. the Ph.D., is primarily intended for students desiring a career in research andor collegiate teaching. The focus is on advanced ECE topics, on learning to perform research and to write research papers, and on making fundamental new contributions to an ECE topic. Students take advanced course work and write a doctoral dissertation, also called a thesis. Program Overview: Students newly admitted to a doctoral program are classified as precandidates. Upon entering a doctoral program, there is a Ph.D. qualifying process, normally completed during the first two years. After all requirements except the dissertation are completed, students become candidates. Students entering the ECE doctoral program with a bachelor’s degree typically become candidates in the third year and and are strongly encouraged to complete the degree within five years. Such students ordinarily complete the requirements for a master’s degree along the way and receive this degree in addition to the Ph.D. A masters thesis is optional. Students who enter the ECE doctoral program with a master’s in the field of their program typically become candidates in their second year and are strongly encouraged to complete the degree within four years. Such students are not ordinarily eligible to receive an additional master’s degree. The field of communication involves the transmission of information from one place to another place or storing information for later retrieval. A communication system is a pair of stations – a transmitter station and a receiver station. Communication networks are collections of receiving and transmitting stations that may relay information from one station to another by means of other stations acting as relays. There are many components in the process of transmitting information in a communication system. One component is information representation in minimal form, that is data compression. A second aspect of communication is modulation; the process whereby information is mapped into waveforms suitable for propagation. A third aspect is error control coding; the method by which errors made in receiving information can be corrected. The performance of a communication system is usually measured in terms of the probability of incorrectly decoding the information or the distortion between the original information-bearing signal and the reconstruction, and the energy used. In communication networks there are many components needed in the processing of sending information from one station to another via a set of intermediate stations. One aspect is medium access control – meaning which stations should transmit and when. Another aspect of communication networks is routing – meaning which set of stations should be used as relays in communicating information from one station to another station. The performance measures in communication networks are the network throughput (correctly decoded packets end-to-end) along with the energy consumed. Communications research at U-M is investigating the fundamental limits of performance possible in communication systems and communication networks and the practical methods of achieving close to the fundamental limits. The applications that are of interest include cellular communication networks, sensor networks, and optical communication systems.