Jelena Kovačević

Jelena Kovačević is a Serbian American engineering professor, whose research has focused on signal processing and data science. She was named the first female dean of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering at New York University (NYU) in August 2018. In May 2023, she announced she will be stepping down effective August 2024.

Education
Kovačević received her Engineering Diploma Degree in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade and her MS and PhD from Columbia University, under doctoral advisor Martin Vetterli, with whom she later co-authored multiple books on signal processing and wavelet theory.

Career
Kovačević became head of NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2018, the first woman to do so in the school's 164-year history. At the end of her five-year term in May 2023, she announced she would be stepping down effective August 23, 2024. Under her leadership, NYU Tandon experienced significant growth in enrollment, from more than 5,000 students in Fall 2015 to nearly 8,000 students in Fall of 2021, and fell in the U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Engineering School Rankings from #33 in 2022-2023 to #41 in 2024-2025, marking the end of a 10-year streak in which Tandon had gained 30 positions.

From 2014-2018, she was department head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to that, she was a professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, which she joined in 2003. She was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University and worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1991-2002.

Kovačević has written numerous papers and has also co-authored several books, including "Wavelets and Subband Coding", "Foundations of Signal Processing" and "Fourier and Wavelet Signal Processing". A fellow of the IEEE and EURASIP, she is also the recipient of several awards, including the "Belgrade October Prize", the "E.I. Jury Award" from Columbia University, the "CIT Philip L. Dowd Fellowship Award" from Carnegie Mellon University, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2016, and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBS) Career Achievement Award in 2022. She has been a keynote or invited speaker at a number of academic conferences. Her research interests include applying data science to a number of domains such as biology, medicine and smart infrastructure. She is also an authority on multiresolution techniques, such as wavelets and frames.

Family
Jelena Kovačević was born in the family of Margita Kovačević and Živorad Kovačević, a Yugoslav politician, diplomat, and academic, who was the 60th Mayor of Belgrade in 1974-1982 and Yugoslavia's Ambassador to the United States in 1987-1989, when he was recalled after his disapproval of Slobodan Milosević's regime.