Wendi Heinzelman

6th Annual Bunshaft Lecture

"Inspiring the Next Generation of Leaders to Make the World Ever Better"

Featuring Wendi Heinzelman, PhD
Professor and Dean, Hajim School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences, University of Rochester

Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Campus Center, Assembly Hall
University at Albany Uptown Campus
10 a.m. - Check-in begins
10:30 a.m. - Lecture
11:30 a.m. - Reception to follow

About the Speaker

Wendi Heinzelman is Dean of the Edmund A. Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester. She is also a full professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. During spring 2008, Heinzelman was a Visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. She received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1995 and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1997 and 2000, respectively. In 2005, Heinzelman was a recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Career award, a five-year grant awarded to faculty early in their academic careers who have an innovative plan for their research, educational and outreach vision.

Professor Heinzelman's current research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and networking, mobile computing, and multimedia communication. She is a co-founder and member of Networking Networking Women (N^2 Women), a member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), a Distinguished Scientist of ACM Sigmobile, and a Fellow of the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the IEEE Computer Society.

In her free time, Professor Heinzelman enjoys sailing, running and biking in the summer and downhill and cross-country skiing in the winter. Having traveled extensively on several continents and to 40 countries around the world, she would like to someday bike across the United States with her husband. As the daughter of an electrical engineer and a teacher, Heinzelman grew up in a world where she believed she could do anything. Her parents have both been personal and professional inspirations to her. She is passionate about educating young people about the exciting possibilities in careers in engineering and computer science. She says her mother, who worked with inner-city children, demonstrated the huge impact a good teacher can have on the next generation. Her father, Lawrence Rabiner, an electrical engineer who spent most of his career at AT&T Bell Labs, invented one of the first speech recognition systems. His passion for his work and ability to solve problems through engineering was a huge inspiration for her choosing to pursue engineering as a career.

For more information about Dean Heinzelman, view her website: https://www.ece.rochester.edu/~wheinzel/.

Abstract

Technology has and will continue to transform how we live, work and play. In this environment of ever-evolving technology, it is vital that we educate the next generation to not only learn the fundamentals but to also be creative, globally-minded, analytical thinkers who will meet the challenges we are yet to foresee. I have spent my career working to encourage students to find their passion for careers in engineering and computer science, and to ensure that we provide support and training for diverse populations to pursue this field. In this talk, I will discuss my career path as well as my vision for how to best train our future leaders to make the world ever better.

Bunshaft Lecture