The Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has named renowned Carnegie Mellon University researcher and professor Diana Marculescu as the next chair of UT’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She will assume her position on Dec. 1, 2019, succeeding the department’s current chair, Ahmed Tewfik.
Marculescu will join UT after serving on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon for nearly two decades. During her tenure at the Pittsburgh-based university, she held positions as the David Edward Schramm Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the founding director of the Center for Faculty Success in the College of Engineering and the associate department head for Academic Affairs in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Diana to the university and to our Texas Engineering community,” said Sharon L. Wood, dean of the Cockrell School. “The vision and expertise that she brings — both in her research and as a proven academic leader — will help drive innovation among our faculty and students and advance our electrical and computer engineering curriculum. I know she will be a strong leader and a transformative addition to the Cockrell School.”
Marculescu, who is a pioneer in energy-aware computing, earned her M.S. in computer science from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest in Romania and her Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California. Her expertise spans areas of energy- and reliability-aware computing, hardware-aware machine learning and computing for sustainability and natural science applications.
“With the Cockrell School’s location in the heart of Austin — one of America’s most innovative cities and a rapidly growing tech hub for top global companies — I can think of no better opportunity to begin the next chapter of my academic career,” said Marculescu. “I am honored to join UT’s world-class electrical and computer engineering community, and I look forward to working closely with the students, faculty and staff to maximize the department’s potential in the years ahead.”
As the founding director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Faculty Success, Marculescu has developed and run programs for faculty recruiting, mentoring, development and diversity/inclusion awareness for over 300 faculty members in engineering and across other colleges at the university. She is an internationally recognized researcher and has been honored with several awards throughout her career, including the National Science Foundation Faculty CAREER Award, the ACM SIGDA Technical Leadership Award and the Carnegie Institute of Technology George Tallman Ladd Research Award. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Distinguished Scientist within the Association for Computing Machinery.
Marculescu takes over for Ahmed Tewfik, who has served as the chair of electrical and computer engineering since 2010 and who guided the department through a period of sustained growth and success.
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is the largest department in the Cockrell School, with more than 2,200 students and 75 faculty members. Located in the state-of-the-art Engineering Education and Research Center on the UT Austin campus, the department is recognized as a national leader in research and education, with its programs consistently ranked among the top 10 in the country by U.S. News & World Report. The department had nearly $23 million in research expenditures in 2017-2018, an increase of 30% from five years earlier. With an award-winning faculty that includes a National Science Foundation Waterman Award winner, an Emmy Award winner, a Franklin Institute Medal recipient, two members of the National Academy of Engineering and three fellows of the National Academy of Inventors, Texas ECE has been home to world-renowned thought leaders and innovators for over a century.
