Alum Nikos Sidiropoulos named ECE chair at University of Virginia

Alumnus Nikolaos Sidiropoulos (EE Ph.D. 1992) has joined the University of Virginia as the chair of its Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

At Maryland, he was a student of Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR). From 1994–1997, he was a postdoctoral researcher and assistant Research Scientist at ISR. Prior to his current appointment, Sidiropoulos served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, the Technical University of Crete, Greece, and the University of Virginia.

“Nikos has become a leading researcher in signal processing and communication networks,” Baras said, “especially with respect to complex algorithms involving clever and novel use of multi-dimensional tensors and their decompositions, with multitude of applications, which have emerged again as very valuable in the current efforts in deep learning. In addition, he has established himself as a thoughtful and effective academic leader. We are proud to have him as a distinguished alumnus of both ISR and ECE.”

Sidiropoulos was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 2009 for “contributions to signal processing for communications.” He was elected a Fellow of EURASIP in 2014. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 1998, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award in 2001, 2007, and 2011, and served as IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2008-2009). He received the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award. He received the University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2013.

Sidiropoulos is one of three former students of Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR) to chair an ECE department at a top research university. The other two are Radha Poovendran at the University of Washington, and Mingyan Liu at the University of Michigan.

Published August 30, 2017