Farinaz Koushanfar is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she is the founding co-director of the UCSD Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing & Security (MICS). Prof. Koushanfar received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as her M.A. in Statistics from UC Berkeley. Her research addresses several aspects of efficient computing and embedded systems, with a focus on system and device security, safe AI, privacy preserving computing, as well as real-time/energy-efficient AI under resource constraints, design automation and reconfigurable computing. Professor Koushanfar serves as an associate partner of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing to aid developing solutions for the next generation of embedded secure devices. She has received a number of awards and honors for her research, mentorship, teaching, and outreach activities including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award, Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge Award, Qualcomm Innovation Award(s), MIT Technology Review TR-35 2008 (World’s top 35 innovators under 35), Young Faculty/CAREER Awards from NSF, DARPA, ONR and ARO, as well as a number of Best Paper Awards. Dr. Koushanfar is a fellow of the IEEE, and a fellow of the Kavli Foundation Frontiers of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wanda Gass earned her B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1978 and holds a M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from Duke University. Wanda did pioneer work on Texas Instrument’s first programmable digital signal processor (DSP). During her career at TI she was responsible for advanced development of semiconductor devices for applications including speech recognition, speech coding, video compression, and image processing. She was elected as a TI Fellow in 1999.  

Wanda retired from Texas Instruments in 2012 and founded the nonprofit, Design Connect Create, to empower young women to be successful in high school courses in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM). Wanda is currently serving on the Rice University Board of Trustees, the Association of Rice Alumni Board and Rice’s School of Engineering Advisory Board. 

Wanda has been an active volunteer in the Signal Processing Society and the Solid-State Circuit Society.  She was chair of the Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee of SPS, elected AdCom member of SSCS, and was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2007.  She was the Program Chair of ISSCC, SSCS liaison for Women in Engineering, and is currently the Treasurer of SSCS.

Ingrid Verbauwhede’s main expertise includes system and architecture design, embedded system, ASIC and FPGA design and design methodologies for real-time, low power embedded systems and more specifically embedded security systems. She has experience in interdisciplinary research linking design for security with novel technologies and circuits, and investigating the requirements of novel cryptographic algorithms and software security requirements on secure hardware and HW/SW co-design.

Her ability to cross the gap between algorithm and protocol development and actual implementation in hardware, software and embedded systems has been widely recognized. Ingrid Verbauwhede has experience in running small and large research projects, fundamental ones (sponsored by NSF or FWO), basic research (funded by EU) and applied (in collaboration with industrial partners). Ingrid Verbauwhede is a fellow of IEEE and a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts. In 2016 she received an advanced ERC grant and in 2017 a IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to design methodologies for tamper-resistant and secure electronic systems.

Professor Mona E. Zaghloul, earned her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1975. She was the first woman to graduate with a PhD in Engineering from U of Waterloo. She was the first woman to be appointed as a faculty member at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, The George Washington University in 1980, first woman to be promoted to Full Professor in 1989, and first woman Department Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1994-1998.  She became the Chair again in 2009-2014, of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  During her tenure at GWU, Dr. Mona Zaghloul served as a Program Director in the Division of Electrical Communication and Cyberspace Systems of the National Science Foundation (NSF- 2014-2016), and as a Faculty Hire and Sabbatical Researcher at National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST),  and sabbatical at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL)  in the US, and at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.

Her publications (over 300 papers), patents, teaching, and research, as well as her professional service at the IEEE, have helped to create the scientific foundation for Sensors, MEMS/NEMS systems that led to the establishment of the Institute for MEMS and VLSI Technologies at GWU.  She published widely in those areas and other areas and became a Life Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Jubilee Golden Medal awardee in recognition of her pioneering work.  She was the IEEE Sensors Council President (2009-2010) and received Honorary Doctor Degree from University Waterloo, Canada in 2007.