Each year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recognizes outstanding IEEE members and elevates them to IEEE Fellows. This year at Iowa State University, two Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE) faculty members, Professor Namrata Vaswani and Professor Emeritus Nicola Elia, both received the IEEE Fellow honor.
“It is indeed a well deserved recognition in the field and an honor for the department,” said Professor and Palmer Department Chair Ashfaq Khokhar.
Less than 0.1 percent of voting members in IEEE are selected every year for this elevation with the institute.
According to IEEE, “IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.”
Vaswani was named an IEEE Fellow for her “contributions to dynamic structured high-dimensional data recovery.” She is internationally recognized for her long body of work on two interrelated dynamic big data recovery problems — dynamic Compressive Sensing (CS) and dynamic Robust Principal Component Analysis (R-PCA). She also received the 2014 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for her 2010 paper coauthored with her former student on “Modified CS: Modifying compressive sensing for problems with partially known support.” Vaswani received a Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the recipient of the Harpole-Pentair Assistant Professorship and the Iowa State University Early Career Engineering Faculty Research Award.
Elia is well known for his work with power systems and is the author of seminal papers on quantized and networked control systems. He earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2001.