Not many people can say that they have significantly contributed to technologies we use every day, such as cellular communications and the Internet, but Professor Patrick Hosein of the UWI, St Augustine, can legitimately make this claim for both of these.
A Computer Scientist, Electrical Engineer, and Mathematician, Professor Hosein has worked with some of the major cellular communications companies in the world like AT&T, Ericsson,and Huawei, and has been granted 35 international patents in telecommunications and wireless communications. He also has more than 75 peer-reviewed publications in these fields. Many of his patents are for technologies intrinsic to the various generations of cellular communications technology (i.e. 2G to 5G). Additionally, he has 41 patents which are still pending.
Professor Hosein obtained five degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) including a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After his graduation he briefly worked at Bell Laboratories before returning to Trinidad where he worked at UWI as a lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. On evenings he would use the department’s FAX line to interconnect the Campus Local Area Network with the, then unknown, Internet via a University in Puerto Rico. In this way students on Campus were able to experience the Internet for the very first time. Professor Hosein, together with a team consisting mainly of students, was later contracted by TSTT to develop the registration, management and billing software for the first ISP in Trinidad. He subsequently returned to the USA in 1995, where he remained until 2011, working for telecommunications and cellular companies.
Presently Professor Hosein is the CEO of the Trinidad and Tobago Network Information Centre (TTNIC) which manages the .tt Top Level Domain. He also personally supports the hosting of web sites and provides domain names for over 100 schools in Trinidad and Tobago.
He is also active in the area of Open Data and has set up and manages Open Data repositories (data.tt and maps.tt) for Trinidad & Tobago. After a very fulfilling international career he is now a Professor of Computer Science at the UWI. He recently re-designed the MSc. in Computer Science and replaced most of the courses with new ones that better reflect the needs of the country (mobile computing and cloud tech-nologies). He is also active in a project on Smart Grids and one on the use of ICT for Agricul-ture.
He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has been honoured by the NIHERST as an Icon in Science. He is also a member of the US honour socie-ties Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and Eta Kappa Nu, was nominated for the Ericsson Inventor of the Year award in 2004 and was the Huawei US Wireless Research Employee of the year in 2007.
