Six Georgia Tech Faculty Named IEEE Fellows

Six Georgia Tech faculty members were named IEEE Fellows, effective January 1, 2022. They are Ghassan AlRegib, Bonnie Ferri, Arijit Raychowdhury, and Maryam Saeedifard, professors in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); Levent Degertekin, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; and May Dongmei Wang, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

AlRegib is being recognized “for contributions to perception-based and context-based visual signal processing.” He has been an ECE faculty member since 2003 and is a Georgia Tech ECE Ph.D. alumnus. AlRegib holds the John and Marilu McCarty Chair Professorship and is the director of the Center for Energy and Geo Processing and the Omni Lab for Intelligent Visual Engineering and Science. He and his team of nine Ph.D. students work on robust and interpretable machine learning algorithms and systems for a wide range of applications such as autonomous systems, medical imaging, medication development, and subsurface imaging. They are interested in advancing the fundamentals and deployment of these systems in real-world scenarios. AlRegib was the technical program co-chair for the International Conference on Image Processing 2020 and GlobalSIP 2014. He served two terms on two IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committees–Multimedia Signal Processing and Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing. AlRegib is an editorial board member for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the Elsevier Journal Signal Processing: Image Communications. In 2017, he led a team that was selected to organize the inaugural IEEE Video and Image Processing Cup.

Degertekin is being recognized “for contributions to micromachined ultrasonic and optomechanical transducers and systems.” He holds the G.W. Woodruff Chair in Mechanical Systems and joined Georgia Tech in 2000 as an assistant professor. Degertekin leads the Micromachined Sensors & Transducers Group and advises six Ph.D. and master’s students in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. He also advises three postdoctoral scholars/visiting researchers. Degertekin’s current projects include acousto-optical sensors for safer interventional and diagnostic MRI procedures, wireless intracranial ultrasound imaging systems, capacitive parametric ultrasound transducers (CPUTs) for wireless energy transfer and sensing, capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) systems for Transcranial Focused Ultrasound-based drug delivery in the brain, and intravascular ultrasound imaging system development. He also has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control and IEEE Sensors Journal.

Ferri is being recognized “for contributions to hands-on learning and leadership in higher education.” She has been a professor in ECE since 1988 and served as the School’s associate chair for Undergraduate Affairs and associate chair for Graduate Affairs. Ferri is now the vice provost for Graduate Education at Georgia Tech, a post she has held since 2017. She has previously been recognized for her work in educational innovation and scholarship through the IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Regents Award for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In addition to educational research, Ferri performs research in the area of systems and controls and is a proud Ph.D. electrical engineering alumna of Georgia Tech. She currently serves as the general chair of the 2022 American Control Conference, to be held June 8-10 in Atlanta. The conference is co-sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society. 

Raychowdhury is being recognized “for contributions to energy-efficient adaptive integrated circuit design.” An ECE faculty member since 2013, he is the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and leads the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, where he and his team of three postdoctoral researchers and 13 Ph.D. students work in the broad area of design and application of heterogeneous technologies in digital and mixed signal circuits and systems. They particularly emphasize work in design of on-chip sensors, machine-learning classifiers, neuromorphic hardware, on-die voltage regulators and power converters, and dense memories and logic for low power, resilient, and adaptive systems. Raychowdhury is a mentor for IEEE Young Professionals and Women in Circuits and is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid State Circuits Society. He has served on the technical program committees of 16 IEEE conferences in the last five years. Raychowdhury is the technical program chair for the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference 2022, and he served as the technical program chair of the IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems in 2021.

Saeedifard is being recognized “for contributions to modulation, control, and protection of multilevel converters for high-voltage DC transmission.” An ECE faculty member since 2014, she currently holds the Dean’s Professorship, which is housed in the College of Engineering. Saeedifard leads the Advanced Power Electronics Lab, where she and her current team of nine Ph.D. students work on modeling, control, cyber-physical protection, and application of various power electronics systems for efficient and secure integration, transmission, and utilization of renewable energy systems, as well as vehicular electrification. Saeedifard has been previously recognized with the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society J. David Irwin Early Career Award and the IEEE Region 3 Outstanding Engineer Award. She is currently serving as the co-editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. 

Wang is being recognized “for contributions to biomedical informatics and AI.” She earned her doctorate in ECE from Georgia Tech, and is a Wallace H. Coulter Faculty Fellow and a Georgia Distinguished Cancer Scholar in the Coulter Department. Wang has been a member of the BME faculty since 2002 after working at Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, and currently advises more than 20 trainees in the Bio-Medical Informatics and Bio-Imaging Laboratory (Bio-MIBLab), including one NIH K23 Scholar and 10 thesis students at all levels from BME, ECE, computational science and engineering, and biology, along with Ph.D. students in bioinformatics, machine learning, and the Coulter Department M.D./Ph.D. program. Her research focuses on biomedical big data analytics and artificial intelligence, particularly biomedical and health informatics for predictive, personalized, and precision health. Wang was recently elected chair of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics (ACM SIGBio) and as vice president-elect of conferences for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. She is a Kavli Fellow, an American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, and an International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow.

In addition to the six Georgia Tech faculty members named as IEEE Fellows, three ECE alumni were also elevated to Fellow status. They are M. Brian Blake, Apurva Mody, and Anh-Vu Pham. Blake, who is the president of Georgia State University, was recognized “for contributions to web-based software engineering.” Mody, who is the founder and CEO of AiRANACULUS, was recognized “for leadership in cognitive dynamic spectrum sharing and standards.” Pham, who is a professor in the Department of ECE at the University of California, Davis, was recognized “for contributions to organic packaging technologies."

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