Joel Stanley Engel (born February 4, 1936) is an American electrical engineer who made fundamental contributions to the development of cellular networks.
While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the research staff at Draper Laboratory on inertial guidance and stabilization systems, he also obtained an M.Sc.
He then moved to New Jersey and worked for Bell Labs most of his active research career (1959–83), and also earned a Ph.D. from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn on a thesis on data transmission over telephone lines (1964).
After the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened up new frequencies (1968), his engineering team developed the architecture for cellular network and its parametrization (1971), which was the basis for Advanced Mobile Phone System, eventually commercialized (1983).
Engel was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1996 for contributions to the theory and design of cellular telecommunications systems.