Bio: Rene Cruz joined the UCSD faculty in 1987, after receiving his Ph.D. the same year from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his S.M.E.E. from MIT in 1982 (where he held a Vinton Hayes Fellowship in Communications), and his B.S.E.E. from UIUC in 1980. Cruz was an NSF Graduate Fellow from 1981-86. He received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He co-chaired the Technical Program Committee of the 2001 IEEE INFOCOM Conference, which is the annual joint conference of the IEEE Computer and Communication Societies. He was a general chair of the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, which was held on the UCSD campus. Cruz was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in January 2003.

Research: Professor Cruz's early work was on the analysis of information flow in communication networks. He is known for the development of a research area called 'network calculus' for characterizing the flow of data through packet-switching networks, including the Internet. By analyzing the potential burstiness of traffic flows, the calculus identifies the possible delay of packets queuing up at various points in a network. Previous mathematical analyses of queuing delay were largely confined to statistical approaches that addressed only a single queue. The 'traffic envelope,' a key network-calculus concept, has been applied in a wider range of areas including performance-assessment of data-scheduling algorithms, in characterizations of traffic that crosses network boundaries, in connection with 'Service Level Agreements' (SLAs) for billing in privately operated networks including frame-relay networks run by various telecommunication carriers, and in research aimed at better specifying quality-of-service (QoS) levels for network traffic flows.