| Jelena Kovačević | |||||
| Education: | University of Belgrade (BEE) Columbia University (PhD) | ||||
| Occupation: | Dean of NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering | ||||
| Nationality: | American | ||||
| Birth Place: | Belgrade | ||||
| Father: | Živorad Kovačević | ||||
| Known For: | Books : "Wavelets and Subband Coding" and "Foundations of Signal Processing" | ||||
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Jelena Kovačević is a Serbian American engineering professor and a former dean of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering at New York University (NYU) in 2018-2024.[1] After her deanship, she returned to the faculty at NYU.
Kovačević received her Engineering Diploma Degree in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade and her MS and PhD from Columbia University, under doctoral advisor Martin Vetterli, with whom she later co-authored multiple books on signal processing and wavelet theory.[2] [3]
Kovačević became head of NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2018, the first woman to do so in the school's 164-year history.[4] At the end of her five-year term in May 2023, she announced she would be stepping down on August 31, 2024. Under her leadership, NYU Tandon experienced significant growth in enrollment from more than 5,000 students in Fall 2015 to more than 7,500 students by the Spring of 2023,[5] as well as a growth in research expenditures from $20.7M in FY2015 to $59M in FY2024. The school also rose to a record high #33 in the U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Engineering School Rankings in the edition published in 2022,[6] before reverting to #41 in the edition published in 2024[7] after U.S. News and World Report made significant changes to the methodology with which it calculated graduate engineering school rankings for both the 2023 and 2024 editions.[8] [9]
From 2014-2018, she was department head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.[10] Prior to that, she was a professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, which she joined in 2003. She was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University and worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1991-2002.[11]
Kovačević has written numerous papers and has also co-authored several books, including "Wavelets and Subband Coding", "Foundations of Signal Processing" and "Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing".[12] [13] [14] A fellow of the IEEE[15] and EURASIP,[16] she is also the recipient of several awards, including the "Belgrade October Prize", the "E.I. Jury Award" from Columbia University, the "CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award" from Carnegie Mellon University,[17] the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2016,[18] and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBS) Career Achievement Award in 2022.[19] She has been a keynote or invited speaker at a number of academic conferences. Her research interests include applying data science to a number of domains such as biology, medicine and smart infrastructure. She is also an authority on multiresolution techniques, such as wavelets and frames.[20]
Jelena Kovačević was born in the family of Margita Kovačević and Živorad Kovačević, a Yugoslav politician, diplomat, and academic, who was the 60th Mayor of Belgrade in 1974-1982 and Yugoslavia's Ambassador to the United States in 1987-1989, when he was recalled after his disapproval of Slobodan Milosević's regime.