MADE AT MASON
SIGNALS AND COMMUNICATIONS
Gerry Tian
Improving Systems for a Wireless World Gerry Tian always thought her career would be in a STEM feld. Of course in the 1990s, nobody in China, or even in the United States, called it STEM. “Tings were much diferent then. In China the educational system at that time didn’t have the variety of felds that it does now,” says Tian. “In my generation a lot of young people had a dream to be a scientist. Also, my parents were both engineers.” After she fnished her undergraduate degree in China, she began looking into continuing her education. She found a good ft with systems engineering studies at what’s now known as Mason’s Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications, Computing, and Intelligence, or C4I. Tian chose control as her feld, but says when she frst began, the discipline was “at a low point, and there weren’t many people doing research in the area.” She reasoned that if she approached it from a systems point of view, she could broaden the topic and fnd meaningful connections. She earned her PhD (also at Mason), and in 2000 went to Michigan Tech and become one of their frst research faculty members. Michigan Tech had been known for it’s strong undergraduate teaching mission and was beginning to build a research enterprise. Tian’s research and tenure dossier became a model for subsequent faculty hires. continued
SIGNALS AND COMMUNICATIONS
Making efcient signals and communications by processing complex patterns of information with the best defnition.
