News & Events
Fall 2015 eNewsletter: Message from the Chair
Dear EE Community: 
Fall has arrived and I hope you are enjoying the colorful change of seasons. After a rejuvenating summer, our faculty, staff and students are once again hard at work building a great future for UW EE. This fall quarter we welcomed more than 158 new undergraduate students, 73 daytime master’s program students and 49 evening master’s students. Our academic programs continue to be very competitive and we are proud to be the producers of the sixth highest number of EE bachelor's degree graduates in the nation!
The fall quarter is off to an excellent start. In addition to celebrating the 90th birthday and the culmination of a successful endowed scholarship campaign for the first female faculty hired in UW EE, Professor Emerita Irene Peden, our department is home to a new NSF Center. As part of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) program to advance nanoscale science, UW EE was one of 16 sites selected for a new center to lead efforts in nanoscale science for the entire Pacific Northwest.
This fall quarter we also are excited to welcome new faculty in big cyber physical data and computing. Data analysis expert and Washington Research Foundation Professor Eli Shlizerman, who joined the UW Department of Applied Mathematics three years ago, assumed a joint tenure-track appointment in Electrical Engineering this fall. Researching the smart grid and smart urban spaces, Lillian Ratliff will join UW EE next fall after completing a year of postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. Our junior faculty continue to do extremely well. Arka Majumdar, who joined UW EE in 2014, is one of only three recipients to be honored with a 2015 Intel Early Career Award.
Our vision to develop tomorrow’s leaders in electrical engineering innovation continues to take shape. Our department is a leader in entrepreneurial efforts across campus. Since 2009, we have been the number one department in terms of start-up spin-offs across campus. As you may have heard, Thomson-Reuters named UW #4 for Innovation for 2015. With a fresh academic year ahead of us, I look forward to seeing ideas take shape and emerge from our labs as the next generation of companies and products.
The UW EE community is strong, thanks to the relationships being formed between faculty, students, alums and industry. Collaboration is the essence of the success that we are seeing and will continue to see in the coming year. Thank you for being part of building UW EE as a premier electrical engineering department in the nation.
Best to all,
Radha Poovendran
Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical Engineering
