Laura Balzano is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and of Statistics by courtesy, at the University of Michigan. She is the Associate Chair of Undergraduate Affairs in the division of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is recipient of the NSF Career Award, ARO Young Investigator Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and faculty fellowships from Intel and 3M. She received an MLK Spirit Award, the Vulcans Education Excellence Award, and the Sarah Goddard Power award at the University of Michigan. She received an Early Career Alumni award from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her main research focus is on leveraging compact and low-dimensional structure to develop efficient machine learning techniques to handle big, messy data — highly incomplete or corrupted data, uncalibrated data, and heterogeneous data — with applications in a wide range of scientific problems. Her expertise is in statistical signal processing, matrix factorization, and optimization. Laura received a BS from Rice University, MS from UCLA, and PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Would you like to read Laura’s blog? In it, she discusses science and the cultural role of scientists, gender issues, and a smidgen of politics. Also there are a lot of funny links. Seriously, check out the dinosaur programmers.