New Communications and Signal Processing Faculty Join ECE

This spring, the University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering welcomes two new faculty members, Piya Pal (ECE) and Behtash Babadi (ECE/UMIACS) as assistant professors. They will be teaching Communications and Signal Processing courses beginning this semester.

Piya Pal received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA. During her time at Caltech, she worked in the Digital Signal Processing Lab, supervised by Professor P. P. Vaidyanathan.

Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Pal received the B. Tech degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2007 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2008. Her research interests include statistical signal processing, sparse sampling and reconstruction techniques, optimization, and sensor array processing.

Pal received various awards for her research, including the Best Student Paper Award at the 14^th IEEE DSP Workshop, 2011, the Student Paper Award at the 45^th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, and she was one of three winners of the 2013 Everhart Lecture Series, selected across all disciplines at Caltech.

Behtash Babadi received the Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University under the supervision of Professor Vahid Tarokh, in 2011 and 2008, respectively, and the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2006. His research interests include statistical and adaptive signal processing, biological signal processing, compressed sensing, and systems neuroscience.

Prior to joining the university, Babadi was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as at the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, under the mentorship of Professor Emery N. Brown.

Published January 15, 2014