Ahmed H. Tewfik is an

Egyptian-American Egyptian Americans () are Americans of partial or full Egyptian ancestry. The 2016 US Census estimated the number of people with Egyptian ancestry at 256,000, most of whom are from Egypt's Christian Orthodox Coptic minority. Egyptian Americans m ...

electrical engineer, professor and college administrator who currently serves as the

IEEE Signal Processing Society The IEEE Signal Processing Society (IEEE SPS) is one of the nearly 40 technical societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the first one created. Its mission is to "advance and disseminate state-of-the-art scie ...

President. He also holds the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering #1 at

UT Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

. He served as the former chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the

Cockrell School of Engineering The Cockrell School of Engineering is one of the eighteen colleges within The University of Texas at Austin. It has more than 8,000 students enrolled in eleven undergraduate and thirteen graduate programs. Annual research expenditures are over $26 ...

at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

from 2010 to 2019. For his research and contributions to the field of Signal Processing he was elected as an

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

Fellow in 1996, received the IEEE Third Millennium Award in 2000, and awarded the 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award.

Early life and career

Tewfik spent his childhood in

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

and

Lebanon Lebanon, officially the Republic of Lebanon, is a country in the Levant region of West Asia. Situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian Peninsula, it is bordered by Syria to the north and east, Israel to the south ...

. He received his B.S.E.E. from

Cairo University Cairo University () is Egypt's premier public university. Its main campus is in Giza, immediately across the Nile from Cairo. It was founded on 21 December 1908;"Brief history and development of Cairo University." Cairo University Faculty of En ...

in 1982 and both a M.S.E.E. in 1984 and

Sc.D. A Doctor of Science (; most commonly abbreviated DSc or ScD) is a science doctorate awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. Africa Algeria and Morocco In Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia, all universities accredited by the s ...

in 1987 from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

Alan S. Willsky
an
Bernard Levy
were his dissertation advisers. After briefly working at Alphatech, he began his educational career as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

in 1987. He became the endowed E. F. Johnson professor of Electronic Communications in 1993. From August 1997 to August 2001 he took a partial leave of absence to co-found and become president and CEO of Cognicity, Inc., an entertainment marketing software tools publisher. He received the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party * National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political g ...

Research Initiation Award in 1990 and the Taylor Faculty Development Award from the Taylor Foundation in 1992. He was elected an

Fellow in 1996 and was a distinguished lecturer of the

from 1997 to 1999. For his research and contributions to the field of Signal Processing he was awarded the IEEE Third Millennium Award in 2000 and the

Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2017. Tewfik has been extremely active in the

and currently serves as president. Previously he served on the Board of Governors from 2006 to 2008 and as the 2010–2012 SPS Vice President-Technical Directions. He was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters publication serving in the role from 1993 to 1997. In 2010, he was selected to succeed Anthony Ambler as chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the

at the

. In 2019, he was succeeded as chair by Diana Marculescu.

Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin

Under Tewfik's tenure the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering moved up in the '' U.S. News & World Report'' Rankings to become consistently ranked in the top ten programs nationally. He launched several new programs within the ECE department including an integrated bachelors / masters program and an online executive masters program. He also launched the department's first set of

MOOC A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the World Wide Web, Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and p ...

courses (massive open online courses). One of Tewfik's key priorities during his tenure was to expand diversity at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Under his leadership, the percentage of female students in the entering class grew from less than 13.7% in the fall of 2011 to over 22% by the fall of 2016. He also tripled the number of female faculty members in the department. In parallel, he implemented a number of student support programs that emphasize hands-on experience to drive four year graduation rates from 16% to 41% for the underrepresented student minority population. Overall first-year student retention rates increased from 78% in 2011 to 92% in 2015 during his tenure.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tewfik, Ahmed 1960 births Living people Egyptian electrical engineers American people of Egyptian descent Cairo University alumni Fellows of the IEEE MIT School of Engineering alumni University of Texas at Austin faculty