Milenkovic elevated as IEEE Fellow for DNA data storage work

ECE ILLINOIS Professor Olgica Milenkovic has been elevated as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is also a researcher at the Coordinated Science Lab and affiliated with the Beckman Institute at Illinois. She is one of 35 women elevated this year, a record number for the organization.

Milenkovic is honored "for contributions to genomic data compression." Her research focuses on big data compression and practical employment of DNA-based data storage. In 2015, she attracted one of the inaugural Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Awards from the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the amount of $1.3M. Her work has received wide-spread recognition, including media outlets like Scientific American.

Four other Illinois faculty members were also named as IEEE Fellows this year, including three who are ECE ILLINOIS affiliates. CS @ ILLINOIS Professor Marco Caccamo was honored "for contributions to the theory and applications of hard real-time multicore computing," and Mechanical Science and Engineering Professors Andrew G Alleyne and Naira Hovakimyan were recognized "for contributions to the control of thermal management systems" and "for contributions to control with applications to aerospace and robotic systems," respectively. All three are also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab. Hovakimyan is also afilliated with the Beckman Institute.

As the world's largest technical professional organization, IEEE boasts more than 423,000 members in over 160 countries around the world, all with technical interests are rooted in electrical and computer sciences, engineering, and related disciplines. The organization publishes nearly a third of the world’s technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics, including approximately 200 transactions, journals, and magazines published annually.