Rentao Gu is currently an IEEE Senior Member and a Full Professor in School of Information and Communication Engineer in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. He has been actively contributing as an IEEE volunteer since 2004, when he was elected as the Publicity Chair of IEEE BUPT Student Branch. In 2005, he was the Publicity Chair and Organizing Committee Member of Region 10 Student Congress 2005. This was the first big IEEE event that he was involved in. After that, he organized many student’s activities on campus, including technical lectures, paper writing seminars, enterprise visits etc. His contribution significantly increased the IEEE impact and student membership during that period.
After his graduation from BUPT in 2010, he continued to serve IEEE as an active volunteer. In 2010, he formed IEEE GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) Affinity Group in Beijing Section, which is the first GOLD Affinity Group in China. GOLD Affinity Group is the predecessor of Young Professional (YP) Affinity Group, aiming to serve the young engineers and young scientists for their career development. After that, he held many IEEE STEP (Student Transition and Elevation Partnership) events jointly with local IEEE student branches from 2011 to 2020, to help the transition from student member to regular members. Besides, he helped to form IEEE Computer Society Student Chapter as an advisor in 2012. Under his leadership, Beijing YP Affinity Group received the Best YP Award in China in 2017.
He has also been serving in various IEEE societies. For example, he was a member of the Membership Development Committee (MDC) of IEEE Computer Society in 2012 and 2013 aiming to promote IEEE-CS membership in Asian region, and Young Professionals Standing Committee of IEEE Communication Society in 2016 and 2017. He was also a member of the Award Committee for IEEE ComSoc Best Young Professional Award 2016, Planning Committee of IEEE ComSoc YP Events for WCNC 2017 and Globecom 2016, and moderator of IEEE ComSoc YP Events on IEEE GreenComm2016.
After various volunteering positions in IEEE, he has been appointed as a member of the Young Professionals Committee of IEEE Region 10 in 2019. Since then, he has been focusing on the YP development in the Asian region. With the support of Region 10 YP Chairs, he is trying to form new YP Affinity groups, and operates the Region 10 New/Dormant YP Fund to provide the seed fund to new YP affinity group and re-activate the existing ones. As an invited speaker, he has shared his experience and understanding of Young Professional in IEEE Students Young Professionals Women in Engineering Life Members (SYWL) Virtual Congress 2020 and IEEE Region 10 Young Professionals Affinity Group Officer Training 2021.
Prof. Rentao Gu always emphasizes the connection between the enterprises and the universities. In his roles in IEEE, he organized many university-industry joint events to make the members stick together and to enhance the industry-university cooperation for joint innovations. As a teacher, he brought the industrial application cases into the course lectures, took real industrial problems into final course evaluation, invited technique experts from well-known companies to share their cutting edge views on the future direction, and developed novel network platform testbed for undergraduates’ innovation projects. These measures greatly stimulated students’ innovative consciousness and cultivated students’ innovative ability, and he was awarded Beijing Municipal Outstanding Young Teacher in 2021.