Jelena Kovačević
Welcome Remarks
Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Jelena Kovačević became the Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in August 2018. She is the first woman to head the school since its founding in 1854 as the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute.
Since her arrival, she has garnered numerous accolades, including inclusion on the City & State “Higher Education Power 50,” “Tech Power 50,” and “50 over 50” lists, as well as Crain’s “Notable Women in Tech” rankings. She has also been appointed to the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Engineering Deans Council Executive Board in which capacity she works with her fellow deans to provide vision and leadership on engineering research, education and engagement. Additionally, she is the founder and co-chair of the Northeast Regional Deans (NeRDs) council.
At Tandon, she is committed to getting more women interested in technology. Tandon's freshman class has more than double the national average of women in engineering and a quarter of its faculty are women, but Jelena works to make that number grow. She is focused on investing in research (Tandon recorded its highest single year research expenditures at $52M) and helping the school continue its historic rise in the college rankings (over 40 spots in a decade). She also oversees 12 research centers committed to advancing topics like AI, 5G, cyber security, and urban development.
During the pandemic, she maintained hybrid learning, creating in-person environments in Shanghai so students who couldn't fly to the U.S. could continue their studies.
Jelena received the Dipl. Electrical Engineering degree from the EE Department, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1986, and the MS and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, New York, NY, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. From 1991-2002, she was with Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. She was a co-founder and Technical VP of xWaveforms, based in New York City, NY. She was also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. In 2003, she joined Carnegie Mellon University, where she was the Hamerschlag University Professor, Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
She is a Fellow of the IEEE and EUSIPCO and a coauthor (with Martin Vetterli) of the book Wavelets and Subband Coding(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995) as well as a coauthor (with Martin Vetterli and Vivek K Goyal) of Foundations of Signal Processing (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She coauthored a top-10 cited paper in the Journal of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, a top-100 downloaded paper on IEEE Xplore and the paper for which Aleksandra Mojsilović received the Young Author Best Paper Award. Her paper on multidimensional filter banks and wavelets (with Martin Vetterli) was selected as one of the Fundamental Papers in Wavelet Theory. She received the Belgrade October Prize in 1986, the E.I. Jury Award at Columbia University in 1991, the 2010 CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award from the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award.
She served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. on Image Processing from 2002-2006, Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, Guest Co-Editor (with Ingrid Daubechies) of the Special Issue on Wavelets of the Proceedings of the IEEE, Guest Co-Editor (with Martin Vetterli) of the Special Issue on Transform Coding of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and a Guest Co-Editor (with Robert F. Murphy) of the Special Issue on Molecular and Cellular Bioimaging of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. She was on the Editorial Boards of the Springer-Birkhauser Applied and Numerical Harmonic Analysis, Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing, SIAM book series on Computational Science and Engineering, Journal of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
She was a regular member of the NIH EBIT Study Section from 2008-2012. From 2000-2002, she served as a Member-at-Large of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors. She is the past Chair of the Bio Imaging and Signal Processing Technical Committee and on the ISBI Steering Committee. She was the General Chair of ISBI 2006 and 2015, General Co-Chair (with Vivek Goyal) of the DIMACS Workshop on Source Coding and Harmonic Analysis 2002 and General Co-Chair (with Jan Allebach) of the Ninth IMDSP Workshop 1996.
She was a plenary/keynote/tutorial/invited speaker at the Graph Signal Processing Workshop 2016, CompImage 2014, IEEE GlobalSIP 2013, IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium 2012, Automated Imaging & High-Throughput Phenotyping 2012, Mathematics and Image Analysis 2012, IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging Symposium 2011, From Banach Spaces to Frame Theory and Applications 2010, 20 Years of Wavelets 2009, European Women in Mathematics 2009, MIAAB Workshop 2007, Statistical Signal Processing Workshop 2007, Wavelet Workshop 2006, NORSIG 2006, ICIAR 2005, Fields Workshop 2005, DCC 1998 as well as SPIE 1998.
Research Interests: Biomedical imaging as well as multiresolution techniques such as wavelets and frames
