Thomas Hou was named one of five 2008 Faculty Fellows of the College of Engineering. The award carries a $5,000 discretional fund per year for three years to be used for supporting the recipient's research.

Hou won a 2003 ONR Young Investigator Award and a 2004 NSF CAREER Award, along with two NSF NeTS awards, a NSF ITR award, an ONR Basic Research Grant, and a DoD DURIP award. His personal share of funding is $2.4 million.

Since he joined the faculty in 2002, he has had 45 journal papers published or accepted. He has won three best paper awards from IEEE. He recently organized a highly successful NSF-funded workshop on "Bridging the Gap Between Networking Technologies and Advances at the Physical Layer."

He currently serves as an editor of three journals, two of which are top-tiered ACM and IEEE publications. He has been granted five U.S. patents. He developed and taught two new graduate level courses titled Multimedia Networking and Advanced Foundations in Networking.