Leah H. Jamieson *77
West Lafayette, IN

Graduate Alumni Candidate

“I believe passionately and deeply in education, both for its own glorious sake and as the most powerful sustainable agent for change,” says Leah H. Jamieson *77. Jamieson is the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University. She is also the Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In the mid-1990s she was co-founder of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) and directed it for the first ten years at Purdue. To date, the program has expanded to 18 other universities and 35 high schools in five states.

“It is an engineering design program that connects engineering to society, where teams of students earn academic credit for multi-year, multidisciplinary projects that solve engineering- and technology-based problems for community service and education organizations,” Jamieson says. For her work with EPICS she was a co-recipient of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering 2005 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education.

Jamieson is also an active volunteer in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and served as 2007 President and CEO of the 375,000-member organization. Her honors include: election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering; being a member of the inaugural class of recipients of the National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars; and being named Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and Harriet B. Rigas “Outstanding Woman Engineering Educator.”

Jamieson received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, after receiving her B.S. in Mathematics from M.I.T. At the time, she was one of the few women who were studying in this discipline. She is an active volunteer at Princeton, recently serving on the Electrical Engineering Department Advisory Council (2001-08) and currently serving on the Advisory Council for the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

“Universities, above all other institutions, exemplify the ability to bridge cultures and disciplines, to bring together knowledge, to be a gathering place for people and ideas, to explore synergies, to create new bold solutions,” Jamieson says. And indeed she has devoted her life to doing just that.

She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Committee on Engineering Education and the Steering Committee for the NAE’s 2008 report, “Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering.”

Her research interests include engineering education; speech analysis and recognition; the design and analysis of parallel processing algorithms; and the application of parallel processing to digital speech, image and signal processing. She has generated research contract and grant income of over $35 million at Purdue and has authored or co-authored over 160 refereed publications.

Jamieson explains that she is a firm believer in education “as a gateway to creativity.” She says her days at Princeton showed her “a richness of context” where “engineering connected not only with math, but math with philosophy and her engineering research with music.” Her volunteer work at Princeton has reemphasized the “richness of connections,” she adds. “This is one of the defining strengths of Princeton, and one that has shaped my view both of engineering and of academia.” Jamieson says that in educating the next generation, universities “have the unique opportunity to model the commitment to excellence and the cross disciplinary interactions that will shape the world. It is imperative that 21st century universities rise to this 21st century role.”