The U.S. Department of Education has approved the 2015 Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) Program grant application submitted by our department. The project amount is $922,743.

The project director is Athina Petropulu and the co-directors are: W.U. Bajwa, Z. Gajic, K. Dana, M. Javanmard, S. Jha, J. Lindqvist, L. Najafizadeh, A. Sarwate, and S. Zonouz.

The goal of the proposed program is to sustain and enhance the capacity for teaching and research in the areas of bioelectrical engineering at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Rutgers School of Engineering and at national level. To meet this general objective, the ECE Department will train five doctoral students in cutting-edge research in bioelectrical engineering, and also in pedagogical methods, so that they can assume leading roles in academia and industry upon graduation.

An additional objective is to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities doctoral students, who will pursue careers in bioelectrical engineering fields. The proposed research will lead to novel sensors and devices for acquiring bio-related data, novel methods for processing bio-related signals and extracting information of interest, novel computational models of diseases using supercomputers, novel methods for ensuring trust-worthiness, cybersecurity and privacy of biosensors, bio-data, and bio-computation. This research will lead to discoveries that will revolutionize healthcare, and create new employment opportunities.

Rutgers is providing matching support of 25% of the project cost. Recruitment, selection, and funding of students supported by the project will be carried out in accordance with the authorizing statutes.

ECE Professor Emeritus and former Vice President for Research James L. Flanagan passed away Tuesday August 25th, one day before his 90th birthday.

James L. Flanagan received the Doctor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then joined the research division of AT&T Bell Laboratories. He served 33 years at Bell Labs, retiring in 1990 as Director, Information Principles Research. His near 200 archival publications, two books, and 50 US patents reflect his technical activities in this interval. His work on automatic speech recognition, machine synthesis of speech, and efficient signal coding influenced today's human-machine capabilities and mobile technologies. Under his aegis, electro-acoustic devices evolved, notably electret transducers and auto-directive arrays for teleconferencing. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences.

Subsequent to Bell Laboratories, Flanagan served 15 years as Board of Governors Professor and university Vice President for Research at Rutgers University. His responsibilities embraced industry-sponsored and governmental contract research, spanning computing, communications, medical engineering, signal processing, and graduate education. He served on a variety of industrial, governmental research, spanning computing, communications, medical engineering, signal processing, and graduate education. He served on a variety of industrial, governmental, and academic boards. Among his awards are the National Medal of Science, presented at the White House by the US President, the L. M. Ericsson International Prize in Telecommunications, presented in Stockholm by the King of Sweden and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2005.

For his groundbreaking contributions IEEE established the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2002. The award is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is awarded to individuals for an outstanding contribution to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing.

In addition to his technical achievements, Dr. Flanagan excelled as a mentor of young talent who subsequently attained prominence in their respective fields.

Dr. Flanagan has received Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Paris-Sud, from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, and from Mississippi State University. His early university education was interrupted by service in the US Army 1944, 45, 46. He retired in 2005 and is survived by his wife, Mildred Bell Flanagan, by his three sons, Stephen, James and Aubrey, and his five grandchildren.

Maryam Mehri Dehnavi received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology in 2005, a M.S. in Computer Engineering from University of Calgary in 2007, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from McGill University in 2012.

She was a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley in 2011 and a postdoctoral fellow at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT from 2013 to 2015. Dr. Mehri's research interests include high-performance computing, machine learning, numerical analysis, compilers, and parallel systems.

Before joining ECE, Vishal M. Patel was a member of the research faculty at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 2010. He received the B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics (with honors) and the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, in 2004 and 2005, respectively. 

His current research interests include signal processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition with applications in biometrics and imaging. He was a recipient of the ORAU postdoctoral fellowship in 2010.