Dr. Midkiff, a member of the statewide Advisory Board for CGEP, has taught distance learning courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science for over 10 years to 800 students.
Although at times it is "difficult to feel personal contact with students" and "remote students tend to be more diverse in their background than traditional, on campus students", as an instructor he values the CGEP program because he has the "chance to interact with working engineers who can bring different perspective to class discussions and can make good suggestions about relevant examples or the relative importance of different topics."
He earned his BSE and Ph.D. at Duke University and his MSEE at Stanford University. Dr. Midkiff's research and teaching interests include networking, telecommunications, network applications, mobile systems and computer engineering. Some of his research projects involve network protocols and architectures for wireless and ad hoc networks, network support for pervasive computing and networking issues for land mobile radio systems. He has also been working on network applications for teaching and learning and simulation and performance evaluation of mobile ad hoc networks.
He has taken an active part in engineering education and is the director of Virginia Tech's Integrated Research and Education in Advanced Networking (IREAN) program funded by the National Science Foundation's Integrated Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program.
In 2004, Dr. Midkiff, along with Catherine Eckel and Sheryl Ball, earned the XCaliber award, Virginia Tech's award for innovation in learning, for outstanding contributions by a team in development and use of instructional technology. Most recently he received the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching Innovation from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering.
Not only is he active within the college, but he is a member of many professional societies and activities such as the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Dr. Midkiff is also the department editor for "Education and Training" and an editorial board member for IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine and has had over 200 refereed publications.
He believes CGEP "truly implements Virginia Tech's slogan that the "Commonwealth is our Campus" because it allows for "students across Virginia to receive high-quality graduate instruction in state-of-the-art topics... important for those students who do not live or work close to a university offering graduate degrees in engineering."
