The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) welcomes seven distinguished individuals from industry and academia to a newly formed ECE department advisory board. The incoming board members will meet at Rice University next month.

The first order of business is to outline an aggressive vision that complements the George R. Brown School of Engineering's strategic plans. In this process, the team will work with ECE on a number of priorities that include research-funding growth, formation of deeper strategic partnerships with industry, faculty career and professional development, enhancement of the graduate and undergraduate experience, and student recruitment and retention.

"The department has a high national ranking, research expenditures are growing, and the faculty is quite active and visible, nationally and internationally," said Behnaam Aazhang, ECE department chair. "Our challenge is to break into the upper tier of the top-10 ranking and to position the department for the future growth that President Leebron anticipates for Rice University. The advisory board is an outstanding group of accomplished individuals with a particular affinity for Rice ECE. With the board's guidance, we can take an already great department to the next level."

The advisory board members, who will serve for an initial three-year term, through 2009, include:

• George Bourianoff, senior program manager in the Strategic Research Group at Intel Corp. His special research interests are in the areas of optoelectronics, advanced devices and quantum computing. Bourianoff serves as co-chair of Intel's Semiconductor Technology Committee and is a part-time manager-in-residence to the Semiconductor Research Corp., a university research management consortium.
• Robert Calderbank, professor of electrical engineering, mathematics, and applied and computational mathematics at Princeton University. A specialist in coding theory, Calderbank is widely recognized by the professional engineering community for his contributions to data communications and storage.
• Mark Dankberg, chairman of the board and CEO of ViaSat Inc. As co-founder and leader of the rapidly growing company, Dankberg has influenced the development of several satellite communication standards and holds many patents on these technologies. He is involved in the development of potential new standards for domestic and international satellite telephony and broadband data networks.
• Tony Heinz, chair of the electrical engineering department and the David Rickey Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at Columbia University. Heinz's areas of specialization include lasers and nonlinear optics and the application of these techniques to the study of nanoscale materials.
• Stephen Sheafor, incoming chair of the ECE advisory board and executive vice president of VizionWare. He brings an invaluable combination of integrated circuit design and business experience to the team. Sheafor is a founder of four companies with successful exit strategies, including Cornerstone Imaging, a high-resolution graphic company, and Sitera, the original developer of network processors. He is an adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice.
• Len Srnka, project leader for land and marine electromagnetic technology for ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company. As a member of the senior technical staff, Srnka has current special interests in marine controlled-source electromagnetic acquisition technology, 3-D modeling, data interpretation and imaging/inversion.
• Turner Whitted, senior researcher and area manager at Microsoft Research. Whitted is an Association for Computing Machinery fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Whitted has served as a distinguished lecturer in the Rice University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and Association for Computing Machinery Transactions on Graphics.

The first advisory board meeting will be held Jan. 12 on the Rice University campus.