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Choosing your research direction
Postdoctoral Experience/Navigating the Academic Job Market
Young Faculty Career Advice
Work Life Balance and Engaging with ITSoc
Panelist Bios
Galen Reeves
Biography: Galen Reeves is an associate professor at Duke University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Statistical Science. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University from 2011 to 2013. His research interests include information theory, high-dimensional statistics, and machine learning. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2017 and was a co-recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2025. He has served the IEEE Information Theory Society as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as co-chair of the 2016 North American School of Information Theory.
Namrata Vaswani
Biography: Namrata Vaswani is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Anderlik Professor of Engineering at Iowa State University. She also holds a courtesy professorship in the department of Mathematics. She received a Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Maryland, College Park and a B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Delhi) in India in 1999. Her research interests lie at the intersection of statistical machine learning, and signal processing, and imaging (MRI and video analytics). Vaswani is also the director of the CyMath K-12 math tutoring and support program at Iowa State.
She is a recipient of the Harpole-Pentair Assistant Professorship (2008-09); the Iowa State Early Career Engineering Faculty Research Award at Iowa State (2014); the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award (2014) for her T-SP paper on Modified-CS co-authored with her graduate student Lu; the University of Maryland ECE Distinguished Alumni Award (2019), the Iowa State Mid-Career Achievement in Research Award (2019), the Anderlik Professorship (July 2019-present). Vaswani is an AAAS Fellow (class of 2023) and an IEEE Fellow (class of 2019).
Professional Service and Talks/Tutorials: Prof. Vaswani taught an invited short-course on PCA and Robust PCA for Modern Datasets at IIIT-Delhi under the Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN) program of Government of India in December 2017. She recently also gave an invited talk at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) workshop on Robust Subspace Learning. She has given invited seminars at universities around the world including a department colloquium at UIUC and a department seminar at CMU. Vaswani has served the SPS and IEEE in various capacities. She has served as an Area Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. She is the Lead Guest Editor for a Proceedings IEEE Special Issue on Rethinking PCA for Modern Datasets, and of a Signal Processing Magazine Feature Cluster on Exploiting Structure in High-dimensional Data Recovery. She served as the Chair of the Women in Signal Processing (WiSP) Committee, a steering committee member of SPS's Data Science Initiative, and an elected member of the SPTM and IVMSP Technical Committees.
Pascal Vontobel
Biography: Pascal O. Vontobel received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering in 1997, the Post-Diploma degree in information techniques in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
From 1997 to 2002 he was a research and teaching assistant at the Signal and Information Processing Laboratory at ETH Zurich, from 2006 to 2013 he was a research scientist with the Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, USA, and since 2014 he has been with the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where, since 2023, he has been a (full) professor, department chairman, and graduate division head. Besides this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002-2004), a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2004-2005), a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2014). His research interests lie in information and coding theory, quantum information processing, data science, communications, and signal processing.
Dr. Vontobel was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2009-2012), an Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2013-2014), a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2014-2015), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications (2014-2017), and a Thomas Cover Dissertation Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2023-2025). Moreover, he was / will be a TPC co-chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (2016, 2027), the IEICE International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications (2018), and the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (2018). He was the director of the Croucher Summer Courses in Information Theory (2021, 2023, 2025), co-organized several topical workshops, and was on the technical program committees of many international conferences. Furthermore, he was multiple times a plenary speaker at international information and coding theory conferences, he received an exemplary reviewer award from the IEEE Communications Society, and was awarded the ETH medal for his Ph.D. dissertation. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Derya Malak
Biography: Derya Malak is an Assistant Professor (Maître de Conférence) in the Communication Systems Department at Eurecom, France. Previously, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of ECSE at RPI between 2019 and 2021, and a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT between 2017 and 2019. She received her Ph.D. in ECE at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) with a minor in Physics at Middle East Technical University in 2010, and M.S. in EEE at Koc University in 2013. Dr. Malak has held visiting positions in INRIA and LINCS, Paris, and at Northeastern University, and summer internships at Huawei, Plano, TX, and Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. Her expertise is in information theory, communication theory, and networking areas. She has developed novel distributed computation solutions and wireless caching algorithms by capturing the confluence of storage, communication, and computation aspects.
Dr. Malak was awarded the Graduate School fellowship by UT Austin between 2013 and 2017. She was selected to participate in the Rising Stars Workshop for Women in EECS at MIT in 2018. She received the best paper awards in WiOpt 2022 and WiOpt 2023. Her research has been funded by the ANR PEPR, NSF, the Rensselaer-IBM AI Research Collaboration, and the DARPA Dispersive Computing Programs. She is the recipient of the ERC Starting Grant 2023-2028 on computing nonlinear functions over communication networks (SENSIBILITÉ).
Kenneth Shum
Biography: Kenneth W. Shum received his B.Eng. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research focuses on coding for distributed storage and sequence design for wireless networks, with recent interests in category theory, type theory, and formalizing mathematics in Lean.
Linqi Song
Biography: Prof. Linqi Song is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA and the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, China. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCLA. His research interests include Information Theory, LLMs, reinforcement learning, and federated learning. He has published more than 200 journal and conference papers at main AI and IT venues, such as IEEE TIT, TPAMI, JSAC, TMC, JSTSP, NeurIPS, ICLR, and ACL. He has been the Associate Editor/Guest Editor for several journals, such as IEEE TIT, DSP, ICN, and he has been serving as TPC members for IEEE ISIT, ITW, Mobihoc, Infocom, etc. He has received the Best Paper Awards of IEEE MIPR 2020, the Best Paper Award of China Communications 2023, and three Silver Medals of Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions.
P. Vijay Kumar
Biography: P. Vijay Kumar received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur and IIT Kanpur, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1983, all in Electrical Engineering. From 1983 to 2003, he was on the faculty of the EE-Systems Department at USC. From 2003-2021, he was a Professor at IISc Bengaluru and since 2021, an Honorary Professor. In 2010-2017, he was an Adjunct Research Professor at USC and, from 2018-2020, a Visiting Professor.
His research interests in general lie in algebraic coding theory and related areas, with application to wireless communication, data storage and navigation satellite systems.
He is a recipient of the 1995 IEEE Information Theory Society Prize-Paper award and the IEEE Data Storage Best Paper Award of 2011/2012. A pseudorandom sequence family designed in a 1996 paper co-authored by him formed the short scrambling code of the 3G WCDMA cellular standard. The Indian Space Research Organization has incorporated the IZ4 family of spreading codes co-designed by him into the new civilian L1 signal of the NavIC navigation satellite system.
He received the USC School of Engineering’s Senior Research Award in 1994, the Rustum Choksi Award for Excellence in Research in Engineering at IISc in 2013, and the 2017-22 J. C. Bose National Fellowship awarded by the Department of Science and Technology, India. He was a Tata Chem Chair Professor at IISc from 2013-2015. He was on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory (IT) Society in 2013-15, 2025-27, was a plenary speaker at IEEE ISIT 2014, a TPC Co-Chair of IEEE ISIT 2015, and Chair of the IEEE IT Society Conference Committee (2019-21). He is a Fellow of the INAE, IAS, and INSA Indian academies and a Fellow of IEEE.
Brian Kurkoski
Biography: Brian M. Kurkoski is a professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in Nomi, Japan. Born in Portland, Oregon, USA, he received the B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1993, and then worked at two California startups. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California San Diego in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He received a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2004 to 2006, while at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan, where he continued as associate professor from 2007 to 2012. He has been at JAIST since 2012. He was an associate editor for IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences from 2010 to 2014. He was chair of the Data Storage Technical Committee, a technical committee of the IEEE Communications Society for 2017-2018, and was secretary for 2013-2016. For the IEEE Information Theory Society, he is the First Vice President (2026), Second Vice President (2025), a member of the Board of Governors for two terms, 2021-2023 and 2024-2026, and was the chair of the Digital Presence/Online Committee for 2019 to 2023. He was a general co-chair of the 2021 IEEE Information Theory Workshop.
Lalitha Vadlamani
Biography: Lalitha Vadlamani received her B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Osmania University, Hyderabad, in 2003 and her M.E.and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore,in 2005 and 2015 respectively. From May 2015, she has been at IIIT Hyderabad, where she is affiliated to Signal Processing and Communications Research Center and she is currently an Associate Professor. Her research interests include coding for distributed storage and computing, quantum error correcting codes, polar codes, Reed-Muller codes and index coding. She is currently serving as the Newsletter Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society.