Hills to be receive honorary degree

PALMER — Alex Hills of Palmer will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage at its 2 p.m., May 4 commencement ceremony at the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage.

The award recognizes his “passion for empowering students and improving the lives of those in impoverished areas of the

world.”

Beginning in the early 1970s, Hills worked on developing communication systems in bush Alaska, first focusing on building radio stations in western Alaska.

Then he led the bush telephone field crews that installed the VHF radiophones that provided the first telephone service in Alaska’s villages. He worked to assure that even the smallest village could receive radio broadcast coverage, telephone service, and eventually television service.

Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he developed the first campus-wide, high-speed wireless network, which served as the prototype for modern Wi-Fi networks in Alaska, across the nation, and around the world.

More recently, Hills has combined his passions for empowering students and for improving the lives of those in impoverished areas of the world by supervising student projects in places like Rwanda, Ghana, Palau, and many other developing

nations.

Hills has taught classes at UAA, sponsored undergraduate research and civic engagement awards, and served on the Advisory Boards of the Mat-Su College, the College of Engineering, and the Honors College. He has advocated strongly with the Alaska Legislature for engineering facilities at both UAA and UAF, and he has sponsored an engineering scholarship through the University of Alaska Foundation.

Hills is a prolific author. His book Wi-Fi and the Bad Boys of Radio chronicles his adventures building both the communication system for the Alaska bush and that first Wi-Fi network. His latest book Geeks on a Mission describes how his students help people in developing nations.

In 2007 he was named Alaska’s “Engineer of the Year.” Today he is just as likely to be found volunteering for community projects near his home in Palmer as teaching and advising UAA students or working on a project on the other side of the world.