Welcome from the 2018 Rising Stars Workshop Chairs
Welcome to the 2018 Rising Stars in EECS Workshop at MIT. We launched Rising Stars in 2012 to identify and mentor outstanding young women electrical engineers and computer scientists interested in exploring careers in academia. We are pleased that the program has grown substantially since its beginning. This year’s workshop will bring together more than 60 of the world’s brightest women PhD students, postdocs, and engineers/scientists working in industry, for two days of scientific interactions and career-oriented discussions aimed at navigating the early stages of careers in academia.
This year’s program focuses on the academic job search process and how to succeed as a junior faculty member. Our program includes invited presentations targeting the academic search process, how to give an effective job talk, and developing and refining one’s research and teaching statement. There will also be panels focused on the early years of an academic career, covering topics such as forming and ramping up a research group, leadership, work-life balance, fundraising, and the promotions process.
The workshop this year will also feature oral presentations and poster presentations by participants, covering a wide range of specialties representative of the breadth of EECS research. The presentations span the spectrum from materials, devices and circuits, to signal processing, communications, computer science theory, artificial intelligence and systems.
Many attendees from previous workshops have gone on to secure faculty positions at top universities, or research positions in leading industry labs. Toward this end, we are pleased to highlight and feature workshop participants by circulating this brochure to the leadership of EECS departments at top universities and to selected research directors in industry.
We hope, in addition, that Rising Stars will give participants the opportunity to network with peers and present their research, opening the door for ongoing collaboration and professional support for years to come.
We are very grateful to the supervisors who supported the participation of the rising stars. We would also like to thank MIT’s School of Engineering, the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education, and the EECS-affiliated research labs—CSAIL, LIDS, MTL, and RLE—for their support.
We look forward to meeting and interacting with you all.
2018 Workshop Chairs
Asu Ozdaglar, Workshop Chair
Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering
Department Head, MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Stefanie Mueller, Workshop Technical Co-Chair
X-Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Farnaz Niroui, Workshop Technical Co-Chair
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT (Fall 2018)
Vivienne Sze, Workshop Technical Co-Chair
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Virginia Williams, Workshop Technical Co-Chair
Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT