L
A
S
S
N
O
T
E
S
photo/phil shockley
C
Engineering professor Rao Yarlagadda, left, has influenced many students during his 40-year career, including former student and now colleague Jack Cartinhour.
Rao Yarlagadda retires after 40 years When Rao Yarlagadda’s former students heard about his impending retirement from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, they surprised their beloved professor with a lasting tribute in his honor. Twenty-one of his 30 doctoral advisees attended the celebration and announced the establishment of a fellowship in his name to support graduate study in signal processing at OSU. Former student Joseph Campbell, now senior member of the technical staff at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory who completed his Ph.D. in 1992, provided the inspiration for the surprise event, and Legand Burge Jr., dean of the College of Engineering, Architecture and Physical Sciences at Tuskegee University, was one of the first to offer assistance. “I thought it was a great idea,” says Burge, who in 1979 was one of the first few African-Americans to complete a Ph.D. in engineering at OSU. “Not only does the fellowship recognize Dr. Yarlagadda in a way that will continue in perpetuity,” Burge says, “it also gives encouragement and provides 104
Winter 2006
financial assistance to graduate students in the area of signal processing.” A native of India, Yarlagadda and his wife, Marceil, came to OSU in 1966 soon after his friend Charles Bacon accepted a job at OSU. The two had become acquainted as doctoral students at Michigan State University. “Charlie later became department head at OSU and was very helpful in building the consortium of oil companies so instrumental in my work.” Yarlagadda’s impact on signal processing includes co-founding Digital Signal Processing Journal and chairing one of the initial international conferences on acoustics, speech and signal processing to be held outside of the East Coast. He also united faculty from electrical engineering, physics and geology with Bacon’s support, and helped improve underground exploration of oil and gas by developing techniques for the modeling of acoustic responses in downhole tools. This endeavor led to the establishment of laboratory facilities and a productive research program at OSU that enjoyed the support of a 12-member
consortium of the world’s leading companies for more than two decades. Work to improve the integrity of digital image processing involved Sandia National Laboratories. Yarlagadda’s collaboration with John Hershey, who completed his Ph.D. in 1981 and subsequently received the Melvin R. Lohmann Medal from OSU, resulted in the development at OSU of the encoding technique, Naturalness Preserving Transform, or NPT. Yarlagadda’s legacy at OSU is exemplified by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s assistance to the National Security Agency in the development of techniques for speech coding and recognition, and data transmission and compression. Campbell, who did his undergraduate and master’s work at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and John Hopkins University, respectively, won a fellowship to pursue a doctoral degree at any school he wanted. And because of Yarlagadda’s professional reputation, he chose OSU. “A lot of people asked, ‘Why are you not going to MIT? What are you doing?’” Campbell remembers. “I mentioned to one of the guys headed to MIT that I was going to Oklahoma State, and he said, ‘Where is that?’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s with Dr. Yarlagadda.’ And even he had heard of Dr. Yarlagadda. “It’s really all about what an amazing person he is and why he’s attracted so many really top people to OSU,” Campbell says. Yarlagadda’s students describe him as a teacher, mentor and friend as willing to compile award nomination materials for them as to help secure housing or unpack U-hauls. “One of the things I did was recruit older graduate students,” Yarlagadda says, “and many of them I had known for years. They were professionals and had degrees from top schools all over the country. “They wanted to come to OSU because we had the kind of Ph.D. program that allowed them to work on projects related to their jobs and the kind