Justin Romberg named 2010 REA Outstanding Young Alumnus

The Rice Engineering Alumni (REA) board of directors recently announced its 2010 awards for Outstanding Engineering Alumnus and Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus (OYEA). Named OYEA was Justin Romberg, assistant professor in the school of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1997, master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1999 and a PhD in 2004, all from Rice University.

From Fall 2003 until Fall 2006, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He spent the Summer of 2000 as a researcher at Xerox PARC, the Fall of 2003 as a visitor at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions in Paris, and the Fall of 2004 as a Fellow at UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. In the Fall of 2006, he joined the ECE faculty as a member of the Center for Signal and Image Processing.

In 2008 he won the ONR Young Investigator award; in 2009 he received a PECASE award and a Packard Fellowship. He is also currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

Dr. Romberg's research interests are on the interface between signal processing and applied harmonic analysis. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the role that mathematical signal structure plays in making difficult processing tasks much easier. Recently, he has focused on how sparse representations can make signal acquisition smarter and more flexible.

Justin was honored during an event on Friday, October 15. The OEA has been presented annually since 1974 and recognizes alumni for outstanding professional achievement and community service. The OYEA, presented since 1996, recognizes the achievements of engineers 40 years and younger.