Who We Are: Leah Jamieson

Leah H. Jamieson received the S.B. degree in mathematics from MIT and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Princeton University. In 1976 she joined the faculty at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, where she is Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering. She served as Director of the Graduate Program in Electrical Engineering at Purdue from 1990-94, Director of Graduate Admissions from 1994-96, Interim Head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002, and Associate Dean of Engineering for Undergraduate Education from 2004-06.

Jamieson is co-founder and past director of the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program (http://epics.ecn.purdue.edu and http://epicsnational.ecn.purdue.edu). EPICS is an engineering design program that operates in a service-learning context. Under the EPICS program, teams of undergraduates earn academic credit for multi-year, multidisciplinary projects that solve engineering- and technology-based problems for community service and education organizations. Initiated at Purdue in 1995, EPICS programs have been created at sixteen additional universities and one high school. EPICS co-founders Leah H. Jamieson and Edward J. Coyle and co-director William C. Oakes were awarded the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s 2005 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education “for innovations in the education of tomorrow’s engineering leaders by developing and disseminating the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program.” Jamieson’s activities related to EPICS have also been recognized by the 1997 Chester F. Carlson Award for Innovation in Engineering Education from the American Society for Engineering Education (with Edward J. Coyle) and the IEEE Education Society’s 2000 Harriet B. Rigas “Outstanding Woman Engineering Educator” Award. She was one of the first seven recipients of the NSF Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars (2001), was inducted into Purdue’s Book of Great Teachers (2003), and was named 2002 Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. EPICS was featured in the PBS documentary Communities Building Community, produced by WFYI Indianapolis in 2003.

Jamieson’s research interests include speech analysis and recognition; the design and analysis of parallel processing algorithms; and the application of parallel processing to the areas of digital speech, image, and signal processing. She has authored over 160 journal and conference papers in these areas and has co-edited books on Algorithmically Specialized Parallel Computers (Academic Press, 1985) and The Characteristics of Parallel Algorithms (M.I.T. Press, 1987). She has been an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer and an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor.

Jamieson has been an active volunteer in the 365,000-member Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is the 2007 IEEE President and CEO. She is past president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, was 2003 IEEE Vice-President for Technical Activities, 2005 IEEE Vice-President for Publication Services and Products, chaired IEEE’s New Technology Directions Committee, and serves as a member of the IEEE Board of Directors and Executive Committee. She has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (1986-87) and the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (1991-94) and as a member of the editorial board for the Proceedings of the IEEE (2000-01). She was awarded an IEEE Third Millennium Medal (2000) and the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s 2003 Meritorious Service Award.

Jamieson serves on the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Committee on Engineering Education and on the Steering Committee for the NAE’s 2006-07 project “Developing Effective Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering.” She has served on the Advisory Committee for the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) (1998-2000). She has been an elected member (1998-2001, 2001-07) and Secretary (1999-2001) of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and was program co-chair for the 2002 CRA Snowbird Conference. She has served on the external advisory boards for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northwestern University and for the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University.

Jamieson is a past co-chair (1996-99) of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and has been an active participant in CRA-W’s mentoring programs and workshops. She served on the 1997 Presidential Task Force on Women’s Issues at Purdue and as co-convener of the Committee on the Status of Women at Purdue (1999-2000). She is founding chair of the Women Faculty in Engineering Committee at Purdue. In 1997-98, she was facilitator/moderator for a series of workshops for science and engineering faculty on gender equity and classroom climate, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and conducted by Purdue’s Women in Engineering Programs, Women in Science Programs, and Division of Theatre. The series led to the publication of a videotape and resource guide for faculty classroom climate workshops on gender equity. Jamieson was one of 15 women in the inaugural class of Women Pioneers of Purdue University (2006) and has been awarded Purdue’s Helen B. Schleman Gold Medallion for efforts on behalf of women students and the Violet B. Haas Award from Purdue’s Council on the Status of Women. She gave a keynote address at the 2002 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and was one of 18 women profiled in the Careers Booklet Women in Computer Science published in 1996 by CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research.

Jamieson is a Fellow of the IEEE , a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.