Piya Pal

Piya Pal is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she is also a founding faculty of the Haliciouglu Data Science Institute (HDSI). She obtained her B.Tech in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, India in 2007, and her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2013 supervised by Prof. P. P. Vaidyanathan. Her Ph.D thesis was awarded the 2014 Charles and Ellen Wilts Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Electrical Engineering at Caltech.

Her research interests include signal representation and sampling techniques for high-dimensional signal/data processing, (sparse) sensor arrays and computational sensing, mathematical foundations of superresolution imaging, and optimization and machine learning for inverse problems. Her contributions to sparse sensing have been recognized by several awards, including the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, and the 2019 US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). She is also a recipient of the 2019 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (ONR YIP) award, the 2016 NSF CAREER Award, and several Best Paper Awards, including the Best Student Paper Award (for her Ph.D students) at the 2017 IEEE ICASSP and 2019 IEEE CAMSAP conferences.

She has served on the IEEE SAM and SPTM Technical Committees, and EURASIP Signal Processing for Multisensor Systems Technical Committee. She is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and as a Guest and Lead Editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT) for special issues on Deep Learning For Inverse Problems, and Fundamental Limits and Modern Applications of Sensing.