SHEILA S. HEMAMI

Professor of Electrical Engineering
332 Rhodes Hall, (607) 254-5128, hemami at ece.cornell.edu
B.S.E.E 1990 (University of Michigan); M.S.E.E. 1992, Ph.D. 1994 (Stanford University)

Research Interests and Activities

Dr. Hemami's research interests broadly concern communication of visual information, both from a signal processing perspective (signal representation, source coding, and related issues) and from a psychophysical perspective. We study how the human brain perceives visual information by developing better models for low-level vision (which occurs in the visual cortex (V1)) as well as for higher-level vision which includes understanding and cognition.

Visit our Visual Communications Lab

Selected Publications

Biographical Information

Sheila S. Hemami received the B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1990 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1992 and 1994 respectively. During her last year at Stanford, she was a member of the technical staff at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo, Alto, California. Upon completing her Ph.D., she joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering department at Cornell where she currently directs the Visual Communications Lab.

She is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. She chaired the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee, and has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. Hemami serves on many program committees and organizing committees in the fields of signal and image processing, compression, and perception.

She has held visiting positions at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL WISH Distinguished Visiting Professor), Princeton University, and Rice University (Texas Instruments Distinguished Visiting Professor). In 2001 she visited the Faculte de Sciences, Rabat, Morocco as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer.

In 1997 she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She held the Kodak Term Professorship of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University from 1996-1999. In 2000 she received the Eta Kappa Nu C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award (a national award), and she has won numerous teaching awards at Cornell. She was a finalist for the Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer in 2003. In 2005 she received the Alice H. Cook and Constance E. Cook Award at Cornell University for her leadership of the Women in Science and Engineering committee.

Hemami is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of Eta Kappa Nu, and Tau Beta Pi.