ECE faculty member elected to rank of IEEE Fellow

Dr. Ed Dougherty from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University recently was elected to the rank of Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Dougherty, the Robert M. Kennedy '26 Chair Professor in the department, is cited "for contributions to the development of genomic signal processing."

With the addition of Dougherty there are now 22 faculty members in the department at Texas A&M who have reached the rank of Fellow. This is considered a significant honor since the number of IEEE members who may be advanced to Fellow grade in one year is 0.10 percent of the total 320,000 Institute membership.

MThe IEEE Directory describes the honor as "one of unusual professional distinction conferred only by the [IEEE] Board of Directors upon a person of extraordinary qualifications and experience." To be considered, candidates must have made an outstanding contribution to the electrical and electronics profession.

Dougherty is considered a pioneer in the study of translational genomics via the use of engineering techniques such as signal processing, pattern recognition and control theory. He is the director of the Genomic Signal Processing Lab at Texas A&M, director of the Computational Biology Division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute and adjunct professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. He recently served as interim director of the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program of the Greehey Children's Cancer Research Institute of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Other honors include being named a Distinguished Lecturer and being named a Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Fellow, both at Texas A&M. He is author of 16 books and more than 275 journal publications.