June 2020
Letter from the Editor
Welcoming the New Editor for the ECE Source
By Badri Roysam, University of Houston
Dear ECEDHA family and friends,
Please join myself and the ECEDHA Staff in welcoming my great friend and colleague Michael Devetsikiotis, Chair of the ECE Department at the University of New Mexico, as the new Editor for ECEDHA’s newsletter. ECEDHA is going through a historic period of renewal and growth driven by the best minds in our collective midst. Appropriately, this newsletter is also set to implement changes and new initiatives that will further serve to bring the ECE Department Heads community in new ways. With his uncommon energy, brilliance, engagement, collegiality, and a laser-like focus, Michael is inarguably the best colleague to take this newsletter to the next level.
With the continued adverse impacts of COVID-19, and the continuing uncertainties about the Fall semester and beyond, the importance of sharing our best ideas in order to advance our field as a whole has never been higher. In this issue of Source, we are proud to feature the efforts of our corporate friends at Texas Instruments aimed at addressing the needs of our students.
Invitation to the Forum!
ECEDHA is proud to introduce a Community Forum for members to hold spirited discussions on topics of their choosing. Click here for instructions on how to access this forum, and click here for a YouTube tutorial that walks you through the basics. Just remember to log in first, using the button on the upper-left corner of the ECEDHA website.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael over an amazing lunch in beautiful New Mexico not long ago. To make a long story short, I finally understood the “Source” of Michael’s energy. When he is not running a large and active department, or his own equally active research and teaching activities, Michael is at the gym leading groups of people in his role as a certified fitness trainer for the well-regarded Les Mills fitness school with its exuberant and energetic style of workouts.
Having revealed the secret, allow me to dwell on Michael’s academic background. Michael Devetsikiotis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He received the Diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1988, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, in 1990 and 1993, respectively.
In 1993 he joined the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. He became a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 1996, and an Associate Professor and Department Associate Chair in 1998. Michael returned to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State as an Associate Professor in October 2000 and became a Professor in 2006. He served as the coordinator of the Master of Science in Computer Networking until 2011, when he became the Director of Graduate Programs, managing one of the largest graduate ECE programs in the country with over 800 students. In July 2016, Michael joined the University of New Mexico as a Professor, and as the Chair of the ECE Department in the School of Engineering. His research work has resulted in over 40 refereed journal articles, 140 refereed conference papers, and 62 invited presentations, in the area of design and performance evaluation of telecommunication networks, modeling and simulation of socio-technical and cyber-physical systems, and studying smart grid communications, smart cities and the Internet of Things. His work has received over 5,600 citations. His work has been funded, among others, by the NSF, NSERC, Cisco, Alcatel, and IBM. In 2017, he was inducted to the NC State ECE Alumni Hall of Fame. Michael joined the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as a Student member in 1985, and ultimately became an IEEE Fellow in 2012. He has served as Chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee Communication Systems Integration and Modeling and continues as a member of the IEEE ComSoc Education Services Board. Between 2008 and 2011 he served two terms as an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer, giving lectures around the world.
He has served as Chair of the GITC, the technical steering committee for ICC and Globecom, the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. He has also served as an Associate or Area Editor of several publications of the IEEE and the ACM; and as technical program committee Chair and in other roles for numerous conferences. In July 2017, he organized the 3d ComSoc Summer School, held in Albuquerque, NM. Since 2018 he has been a member of the management team for the NSF EPSCoR “SMART” Grid, a $20M joint project between UNM, NM State and NM Tech Universities. Since 2019 he has been leading the efforts to launch a Quantum Information Science and Engineering program at UNM. In 2020 these efforts culminated with UNM joining the NC State IBM Q-Hub, and with winning a NSF Quantum Computing and Information Science Faculty Fellow award that is allowing the hiring of a second assistant professor in this area in the ECE department at UNM.
After serving as a member of the awards committee and the conference organizing committee of the ECE Department Heads Association, in April 2020 he was elected as a member-at-large of the ECEDHA Board for a two-year term.
Happy Editing Michael!
Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu
“We've had lessons observed over and over: SARS, the 2009 pandemic, Ebola, Zika, and so forth. I say “lessons observed” very purposefully. That’s different from “lessons learned.” – Gerald Parker