Alumnus Namrata Vaswani named IEEE Fellow

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elevated alumnus Namrata Vaswani (EE Ph.D. 2004) to the rank of Fellow. She is being recognized for “contributions to dynamic structured high-dimensional data recovery.”

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. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

Vaswani is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Iowa State University. At the University of Maryland, Vaswani was advised by Minta Martin Professor of Engineering Rama Chellappa (ECE/UMIACS).

Vaswani is internationally recognized for her long body of work on two inter-related dynamic big data recovery problems – dynamic Compressive Sensing (CS) and dynamic Robust Principal Component Analysis (R-PCA). In fact, she also received the 2014 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for her 2010 paper coauthored with her former student Lu on “Modified-CS: Modifying compressive sensing for problems with partially known support.”

Vaswani’s research is in data science, with a particular focus on statistical machine learning and signal processing. Her work finds applications in fast medical imaging, video analytics, and computer vision. She 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.

Published January 9, 2019