Joel Stanley Engel (born February 4, 1936) is an American engineer, known for fundamental contributions to the development of cellular networks. Born in New York City, he obtained a B.Sc. in engineering at City College of New York (1957). 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. in electrical engineering (1959). 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).