About Me

I’m Abhi Adhikari, a fifth-year PhD student at Columbia University researching mmWave sensing and communication for Beyond-5G wireless systems. I have collaborated with Nokia Bell Labs, IBM Research, NOAA, and Lockheed Martin on projects ranging from software-defined radar, channel modeling, backscatter sensing and communication, and recently interference mitigation for weather instruments and satellite receivers.

My technical interests are in system design, bridging the intersection of wireless technology, data science/AI, and scientific discovery to advance wireless research in new directions.

For example, during my PhD research, I was interested in using the high capacity of mmWave communications to provide a fiber alternative to areas in NYC which lack comprehensive Internet connectivity. This motivated a large-scale measurement campaign which measured the propagation of 5G mmWave signals through various types of glass found in urban buildings, finding that older buildings lack the UV coating, which attenuates the signal by up to 20 dB, and mmWave can offer up to 1Gbps data rate inside schools like Hamilton Grange Middle School (published at ACM MobiHoc'22, dataset available via NIST).

More recently, we worked with Nokia Bell Labs to collect over 1,200 link measurements across Upper and Lower Manhattan and 7 buildings around the Columbia campus, modeling around-corner propagation with 5dB better RMSE than 3GPP models and tracking signals from rooftop base stations for potential cellular V2X applications.

I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering (Magna Cum Laude) from Drexel University in 2021. I plan to graduate with my Ph.D. from Columbia by May 2026. My technical expertise is in software-defined radio, mmWave, system design, and data-science/AI integration.