Nehorai paper wins Sustained Impact Paper Award from IEEE

Arye Nehorai and Petre Stoica published the paper in 1989

Beth Miller  
Arye Nehorai

Arye Nehorai, the Eugene & Martha Lohman Professor of Electrical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected for the 2022 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Sustained Impact Paper Award.

The award honors author(s) of a journal article of broad interest that has had sustained impact over many years on a subject related to the society's technical scope. The paper, “MUSIC, Maximum Likelihood, and Cramer-Rao Bound,” was published in IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in May 1989 

The paper, which addresses problems in the signal processing field, studies the performance of the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods and analyzes their statistical efficiency. The authors also investigate the relationship between the MUSIC and ML estimators and include a numerical study of the statistical efficiency of the MUSIC estimator for the problem of finding the directions of two plane waves using a uniform linear array.

Nehorai was chair of Preston M. Green Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering from 2006 to 2016. He is director of the Center for Sensor Signal and Information Processing and professor of biomedical engineering and of computer science & engineering in McKelvey Engineering and in the divisions of Biology & Biomedical Sciences (DBBS) and Biostatistics in the School of Medicine.

Nehorai received the 2006 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award and the 2010 IEEE SPS Meritorious Service Award. He was elected Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE SPS from 2004 to 2005. He also was editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing from 2000 to 2002. He was the vice president (Publications) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), chair of the Publications Board, and a member of the Executive Committee of this Society from 2003 to 2005. He was the founding editor of the special columns on Leadership Reflections in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine from 2003 to 2006. 

Nehorai was the principal investigator of several multi-university federally funded grants, including the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project from 2005 to 2010. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and has been Fellow of the IEEE since 1994, Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society since 1996, and Fellow of AAAS since 2012.


The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis promotes independent inquiry and education with an emphasis on scientific excellence, innovation and collaboration without boundaries. McKelvey Engineering has top-ranked research and graduate programs across departments, particularly in biomedical engineering, environmental engineering and computing, and has one of the most selective undergraduate programs in the country. With 165 full-time faculty, 1,420 undergraduate students, 1,614 graduate students and 21,000 living alumni, we are working to solve some of society’s greatest challenges; to prepare students to become leaders and innovate throughout their careers; and to be a catalyst of economic development for the St. Louis region and beyond.

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