Those were the days

 ABSTRACT: In this talk, I will share my journey from being a graduate student at the University of Michigan to becoming a Professor at the University of Illinois. I aim to impart valuable insights about friendship, learning, embracing failure, and celebrating success by sharing personal anecdotes. My hope is to inspire and motivate young students and scholars to pursue their scientific dreams, while also provide a realistic perspective on the challenges (and awards) that await them on the long road of academic discovery. 

 BIO: Olgica Milenkovic is the Franklin W. Woeltge professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. She obtained her Master’s Degree in Mathematics in 2001 and PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2002, both from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prof. Milenkovic heads a group focused on addressing unique interdisciplinary research challenges spanning the areas of algorithm design and computing, bioinformatics, coding theory, machine learning and signal processing. Her scholarly contributions have been recognized by multiple awards, including the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Dean’s Excellence in Research Award, and several best paper awards. In 2013, she was elected a UIUC Center for Advanced Study Associate and Willett Scholar while in 2015 she was elected Distinguished Lecturer of the Information Theory Society. In 2018 she became an IEEE Fellow. She has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions of Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-Scale Communications. In 2009, she was the Guest Editor in Chief of a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on Molecular Biology and Neuroscience.