Welcome from the Department Head
Dear ECE Visitor:
Welcome to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Carnegie Mellon. As you find your way through our website, I would like to call your attention to some important information:
- ECE is the largest department within Carnegie Mellon's engineering college, the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In fact, ECE is one of the largest departments on the campus. ECE has over 80 faculty members, including research, adjunct, and courtesy faculty. The department serves about 450 undergraduate and approximately 300 graduate students.
- Exciting new research is taking place in ECE. Cutting edge research areas include cyber-security, information processing and storage, and nano-enabled technologies. Many interdisciplinary research centers and laboratories have a home in the ECE Department.
- The ECE Department collaborates with partners from academia and industry both locally and worldwide. Although the majority of our work takes place on the Carnegie Mellon campus, our collaborations extend far beyond Pittsburgh. We are engaging in global collaborative research and teaching efforts through extension of our academic programs and research agreements.
We hope this website will provide a useful aid as you become familiar with the department. The directory of Hamerschlag Hall will guide you along your way. A section describing ECE undergraduate laboratories in Hamerschlag Hall provides a glimpse into the world of our undergraduates. The graduate portal offers a listing of our graduate student requirements. Another section defining our many centers and laboratories will give you an idea of the range of our commitment to the field.
Happy touring!
T. E. Schlesinger
Professor and Head
ECE Department
Carnegie Mellon University
About Professor Schlesinger
T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger received his B.Sc. degree in physics from the University of Toronto in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1985, respectively. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1985 and served as associate department head of ECE from 1996 to 2004. During that time, he managed tremendous growth in the department, guiding ECE through its accreditation by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and helping to define a new, more flexible curriculum for the department.
His teaching excellence netted him the prestigious Benjamin Richard Teare Award in 2001 from the College of Engineering. He also provided the leadership in establishing the General Motors Collaborative Research Lab, where researchers are developing new technologies for the car of the future. The lab was funded by an $8 million grant from General Motors.
Before assuming department head, he was the director of the Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC). The DSSC is an interdisciplinary research and educational organization in which faculty, students and researchers from a broad swath of academic disciplines collaborate in pioneering theoretical and experimental research that will lead the next generation of information storage technology and help the $60 billion computer storage market continue to expand.
For the past decade, Schlesinger's research interests have spanned broad areas of technology in semiconductor and electro-optic materials, devices and systems. Most recently, his work on optical and hybrid data storage systems has gained international recognition.
Schlesinger's research has been published in more than 200 academic journals and select conference meetings. He holds 10 patents and was a co-founder of Applied Electro-optics Corp. He is also the recipient of many research accolades, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the IBM Faculty Development Award, the R & D 100 Award from R & D Magazine for the development of electro-optic scanners and nuclear radiation detectors in 1998 and 1999, the Carnegie Science Center Scientist Award in 1998 and the George Tallman Ladd Research Award from Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering. He is a Fellow of SPIE — the International Society of Optical Engineers.
Contact Information
See Professor Schlesinger's page in the ECE directory.
