Jelena Kovačević

Kovačević received her bachelor degree in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade and her MS and PhD from Columbia University.[3][4]

Kovačević became head of NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2018, the first woman to do so in the school's 164-year history.[1] At the end of her five-year term in May 2023, she announced she would be stepping down effective August 23, 2024.[2] Under her leadership, NYU Tandon experienced significant growth in enrollment, from more than 5,000 students in Fall 2015 to nearly 8,000 students in Fall of 2021,[5] and rose in the U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Engineering School Rankings from #45 in 2017-2018 to #33 in 2022-2023,[6] before moving to #37[7] after U.S. News and World Report changed their engineering school ranking methodology for the 2023-2024 rankings.[8]

From 2014-2018, she was department head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.[9] Prior to that, she was a professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, which she joined in 2003. She was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University and worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1991-2002.[10]

Kovačević has written numerous papers and has also co-authored several books, including "Wavelets and Subband Coding", "Foundations of Signal Processing" and "Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing".[11][12][13] A fellow of the IEEE[14] and EURASIP,[15] she is also the recipient of several awards, including the "Belgrade October Prize", the "E.I. Jury Award" from Columbia University, the "CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award" from Carnegie Mellon University,[16] the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2016, [17] and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBS) Career Achievement Award in 2022.[18] She has been a keynote or invited speaker at a number of academic conferences.[10] Her research interests include applying data science to a number of domains such as biology, medicine and smart infrastructure. She is also an authority on multiresolution techniques, such as wavelets and frames.[19]

Jelena Kovačević was born in the family of Margita Kovačević and Živorad Kovačević, a Yugoslav politician, diplomat, and academic, who was the 60th Mayor of Belgrade in 1974-1982 and Yugoslavia's Ambassador to the United States in 1987-1989, when he was recalled after his disapproval of Slobodan Milosević's regime.