Following the recent announcement of Professor Ramin Farnood’s appointment as Chair, Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Stark Draper as Interim Vice-Dean Research for a 6-month term, from January 1 – June 30, 2022. During the course of this 6-month appointment, we will be conducting a search to appoint a continuing Vice-Dean Research.
Professor Stark Draper joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an Associate Professor in 2013 and was promoted the Full Professor in 2018. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Stark has served in administrative roles within the Faculty, as Chair of the Standing Committee on Admissions (2016-18); and Chair of the Machine Intelligence major in Engineering Science (2018-19; 2020-present) including contributing to the creation of the major program. He currently serves as a Governor on U of T’s Governing Council, and is a member of Academic Board, Academic Policy and Programs, and Academic Appeals.
His research areas include information theory, optimization, and error-correction coding and the application of tools and perspectives from these fields in communications, computing and learning. He has extensive collaborative research experience with industry, including with Mitsubishi Electric, Huawei Technologies, Disney Research, Bell Labs, HP Labs, and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Please join me in welcoming Stark to this important position for the Faculty.