Press Release: Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering Names Jelena Kovačević To Head Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Contact: Chriss Swaney / 412-268-5776 / swaney@andrew.cmu.edu

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering has named Jelena Kovačević to head its Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), effective April 1, 2014. She will succeed Ed Schlesinger, who is leaving CMU to become dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. ECE Professor Larry Pileggi will serve as interim department head until Kovačević assumes the post this spring.

"I am extremely pleased that Jelena will join the college leadership as the new department head of ECE. Her exceptional scholarly reputation, demonstrated commitment to her colleagues and students, her boundless energy and enthusiasm and collegial nature make her an excellent choice for the position," said James H. Garrett, Jr., dean of the College of Engineering and the Thomas Lord Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at CMU.

Kovačević, a professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at CMU, is a passionate educator whose research involves bioimaging and multi-resolution techniques such as wavelets and frames.

"I am extremely excited about this opportunity. ECE is thriving by all measures of success and I will work together with all the ECE community to push ECE even further toward becoming the creative driving force in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT), CMU and the world for its scholarly and entrepreneurial quality in terms of research, education and societal impact," said Kovačević, who came to CMU in 2003.

An innovative researcher and educator, Kovačević is a fellow of the IEEE and has served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and associate editor, guest editor and editorial board member of numerous publications and special issues. She has been involved in organizing a number of international conferences and meetings, and she was a regular member of the NIH EBIT Study section. She has given numerous plenary and keynote presentations at international conferences and meetings.

A prolific writer, she has co-authored the textbooks "Wavelets and Subband Coding," "Foundations of Signal Processing" and the upcoming "Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing." She co-authored a top-10 cited paper in the Journal of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, and a top-100 downloaded paper on the IEEE Xplore. She received the Belgrade October Prize in 1986, the E.J. Jury Award at Columbia University in 1991 and the 2010 CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award at CMU. She also is a fellow of EUSIPCO.

She has been actively involved in the campus community, serving as the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Affairs Committee Chair for the past 10 years, and more recently as chair of CIT's Enhanced Quality Education Committee. 

Kovačević received her undergraduate engineering degrees from the University of Belgrade and her master's degree and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1988 and 1991, respectively. From 1991 to 2002, she was with Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. She was co-founder and technical vice president of xWaveforms and an adjunct professor at Columbia.

###                                                                       
     
Jelena Kovačević (pictured above) is a professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at CMU. She succeeds Ed Schlesinger, who has been named dean of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.