Douglas B. Williams will become the interim chair for the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, effective July 1. Dr. Williams will succeed Gary S. May, who will become the next dean of the College of Engineering next month, and he will hold this position until a new, permanent school chair is named.

Dr. Williams joined Georgia Tech in 1989 as an assistant professor in ECE, and for the past eight years, he has served as the School’s associate chair for undergraduate affairs. While associate chair, Dr. Williams has had numerous opportunities to represent ECE, both on campus and to external audiences. In the past year, he has served on Georgia Tech’s Executive Board, chaired the International Plan Committee, and been Georgia Tech’s advocate to the University System of Georgia’s Faculty Council.

A long-time member of the Center for Signal and Image Processing, Dr. Williams is active within the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Within that Society, he has been a member-at-large on the Board of Governors, an area editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and a member of the technical committees for Signal Processing Theory & Methods and Signal Processing Education. Dr. Williams also represents IEEE as an ABET Program Evaluator for electrical engineering and computer engineering.

The search for a permanent ECE school chair will begin in August, and the composition of the search committee will be announced later this summer. Plans for temporarily filling Dr. Williams’ current role as ECE associate chair for undergraduate affairs are evolving and will be announced at a later date.

“I’d personally like to thank Doug for agreeing to take on this important responsibility, and I am very confident that he will lead the School very effectively until a permanent school chair can be identified,” Dr. May said. “Please join me in lending your support to him as he assumes the interim school chair role at the beginning of next month and throughout his tenure in this position.”