Coskun to Lead CISE

Dean Kenneth Lutchen has announced that Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) will become the next director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE), replacing Distinguished Professor of Engineering Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE), the new director of the Hariri Institute (see opposite page)

An active presence within CISE for more than a decade, Coskun has done research that includes high-performance computing, embedded systems, and energy-efficient computing; she has nearly 5,000 citations and an h-index of 33. Currently deputy editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, she also has served terms as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design.

Coskun has received several prestigious accolades and honors, including the IBM Faculty Award (IBM Global University Program Academic Award), the Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA); several IEEE best paper awards, and served as an invited participant at the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

As interim associate dean for educational initiatives during the past year, Coskun oversaw the design and implementation of several key initiatives promising to advance the school’s capacity to infuse data science throughout the undergraduate curriculum.

“CISE has great strengths in the traditional areas of information and systems engineering, with core strengths in robotics and autonomous systems, optimization, information sciences, stochastic systems, machine learning, and AI, among several other areas,” Lutchen wrote in an email to the ENG community. “Eventually, these advances must be implemented on a variety of computer systems that integrate software with hardware for specific applications. Ayse is an expert in computer systems and has the potential to open new vistas for systems while leading existing areas of world-class excellence.”

“I’m excited to take on this opportunity,” says Coskun. “If you think about a research center, it’s really a catalyst, bringing together people with different expertise to build something bigger. My goal in my new role at CISE is to continue this center’s strong tradition of collaborative research around the topic of intelligent systems, while fostering growth in the broader area of computer systems, and to make sure we have a coherent, unified center where all these different researchers are supported well and can interact and collaborate.”