UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Juaren Steiger, postdoctoral scholar in electrical engineering, recently received the Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar in STEM Award from the Penn State Postdoctoral Society.
“I was surprised,” Steiger said. “I never expected to win this award among the many great researchers at Penn State.”
Recipients are selected through a small set of criteria, including significance of research and progress toward research goals, community engagement and public-facing work, teaching/mentoring/project management, contributions to the scholarly community and University service and/or engagement. The society held a ceremony on June 12 in Old Main to award prizes to recipients.
Steiger described his research as spanning both theory and application, ranging from scheduling and online learning to networking systems for virtual reality, multi-user interactive simulations and digital twins.
“I study online decision-making under uncertainty, with application to networked systems,” Steiger said of his research. Steiger often works with queueing models, which are commonly used to study communication networks, transportation systems, and industrial facilities.
“Think of it as a line of customers, or multiple lines of customers, and there is one person who can serve the people in line,” Steiger said. “How do you choose what line to select the next customer from? There are so many different algorithms — the length of each line, how long the customer at the front has been waiting, and there are different trade-offs for every decision.”
Steiger also actively participates in academic service work, including offering support as a peer reviewer for journals, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) / Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Networking. He has also held chair and committee roles for multiple conferences, including acting as session chair and technical program committee member for IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) and web chair for ACM’s International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc).
Steiger is a postdoc working alongside Bin Li, associate professor of electrical engineering.
“I’ve actually known Dr. Li a long time,” Steiger said. “We worked on a few papers together during my Ph.D., and I visited his lab for three months as a visiting scholar in 2022.”
Steiger said that Li’s varied expertise has been a benefit to Steiger’s research, while Li spoke highly of Steiger’s balance of technical depth and real-world relevance.
“Steiger consistently tackles challenging problems with innovative, principled approaches,” Li said. “It has been a true pleasure to watch him grow into a mature, independent researcher, one who is now prepared to enter into a faculty role.”