Rabab Ward, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Coach House, Green College, UBC
Tuesday, December 5, 5-6:30 pm, with reception to follow
in the series
Senior Scholars' Series: The Passions that Drive Academic Life
Rabab Ward is Professor Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UBC. She was Director of the Institute For Computing Information and Cognitive Systems (1996-2006) and appointed (2008 -2014) in the Office of the Vice-President Research Office as the natural sciences and engineering research coordinator for UBC. She ensured that initiatives were developed to support research and scholarship in engineering and the natural sciences and that the relevant information was disseminated. In this talk she recalls some of her formative professional experiences and discusses some of the exciting developments and applications in electrical engineering that have kept her curiosity sharp over decades.
Dr. Ward grew up in a Moslem family in Lebanon, and worked there as well as in Zimbabwe and North America. A specialist in the field of signal processing, she had to overcome many hurdles in the course of a career in engineering that began in the early 1960s. For much of her working life she was the only woman in otherwise all-male academic departments. Her career is a series of firsts for women, paving the way across three continents. She was the first woman to join the professional engineering society in her country of birth, Lebanon (1967), the first woman to be appointed as lecturer in the university of Zimbabwe (1975), and the first woman to be appointed a professor in engineering in British Columbia (1981). In 1972, she became the second woman ever to earn a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley.
Her research interests are mainly in the areas of signal, image and video processing. She has made technical advancements to cable TV, HDTV, medical images, infant cry signals and brain computer interfaces. She is the inventor of the non-intrusive measurement methods for cable TV video impairments (licensed to Hewlett-Packard) and co-inventor of a non-interfering video system for measuring size and biomass of fish in cages and Tanks (licensed to J.B Thompson and Associates). She was the Principal Investigator of the $22.2 million CFI/BCKDF award which resulted in a new building at UBC that housed the most modern equipment in all areas related to human centered technologies.