Department Chair: Baback Izadi, Electrical and Computer Engineering
First published in January/February 2013 edition of The Bullhorn. The original publication can be found here.
Excelling early on in math and science, Baback Izadi found an interest in engineering that would develop into a lifelong ambition. His parents encouraged him to pursue medicine, “but I wasn’t really into it. I found it fascinating, as an engineer, to create and make things. I never thought about something else.”
Like many other Iranians interested in engineering, Baback Izadi traveled half-way across the world, exchanging his middle-class lifestyle in pre-revolution Iran for a quality university education in the United States. “Certainly, it was very difficult, living far away from home, but it also provided opportunity to be exposed, to learn a new culture, to experience what a classroom alone cannot provide.”
After obtaining his Bachelor’s degree, he was set upon moving back to Iran and finding a computer engineering job, but the Iranian Revolution stopped him in his tracks. Just like many other Iranians who were already in America pursuing higher education, he continued on to acquire his Master’s, and then his PhD, at Ohio State University.
Close proximity to friends and family in the US and opportunity to collaborate with industries, such as IBM, factored into his decision to accept an offer for professor at SUNY New Paltz. As one of the first faculty members in the newly-created Engineering department, Izadi found “a lot of opportunity to help form and shape the program.” Today, he continues to admire the instructional focus of the college.
As Department Chair of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Professor Izadi experiences the benefits and challenges of an expensive and expanding Engineering department on a comprehensive liberal arts campus. Izadi recognizes immense gains found in the school’s liberal arts requirements in combination with the intense Engineering tracks. “It helps our students develop these soft skills, which will enable them to not just get employed, but to stay employed, and to move up the corporate ladder. What helps engineers move into better positions are these courses in General Education and the Humanities, which develop their communication skills. They get an education not found in traditional engineering programs.”
To be sure, limited funding in a medium-size college restricts the courses, laboratories, and equipment available for expensive programs. Still, the department thrives and excels. “In the past several years, we revamped our engineering programs, and today I would place our program against any program in the US.” In the wake of great achievements, such as high praise during the accreditation process, a new Mechanical Engineering program is underway. Along with Wooster renovations, including new laboratories and facilities, recruiting and curriculum plans are “taking all of our attention.”
For his PhD, in the early 1990s, Professor Izadi worked on fault-tolerant computer systems. As multiprocessors powering large company servers cannot be merely shut down and repaired—imagine if Facebook or Google went offline for more than a minute—super computers must be designed to continue functioning even when a part of the system fails. The current challenge in the supercomputer community is to build the Exaflop computer which would have the ability to execute 1018 instructions per second. These supercomputers enable scientists to model nature—protein folding, the Big Bang, Earth’s Climate—like never before. Since estimates suggest close to a million processors to attain such computational power, the machine must be able to self-correct and manage, otherwise known as autonomic computing. Such a supercomputer is projected to consume about one megawatt of power, requiring a nuclear power plant in its vicinity. Therefore, Baback Izadi’s current research focuses on both the reliability and energy challenges of the supercomputer and data centers.
Engineering offers attractive job opportunities for graduates, but gender and cultural gaps deter growth in the field. Professor Izadi first commented on the difficulties for women: “In K-12 education, females are certainly not encouraged as much as male counterparts to pursue math and science. I talk to some high school graduates who have a very good math aptitude, and they haven’t even considered science or engineering.”
Along with lack of encouragement, labeling engineers as “geeks” and “nerds” further discourages women from the traditionally male-dominated field, since “people don’t want to be associated with those labels. It’s a great tragedy.” Furthermore, when women join the ranks, either as students or employees, the gender gap hurts their workplace experience, as “some women have indicated that they felt out of place, when they work in that environment. It’s not good for the country, for men and for women, that we don’t have equal proportions in programs across the country.”
Professor Izadi believes that encouraging more women to join the field will take time and a large cultural shift. Nationally, young adults are recognizing the huge job opportunities in the sciences when compared to humanities, but an economic recession does not increase the numbers by much. Even with concentrated efforts to encourage female engineers and accommodate their needs, gender ratios in engineering at SUNY New Paltz have not gotten much better: “the number of female students increased, not to the level we would like, around 10 to 15 percent.”
Similarly, despite slight increases during a national recession, only a small portion of Americans pursue engineering. With high starting salaries and four jobs available for every graduate, engineering seems like the obvious choice. Taking advantage of these opportunities, many international students pursue engineering programs at American universities, and often take their expertise and degrees back home overseas.
While our culture idolizes athletes and celebrities, placing “pressure on a lot of students to get into sports instead of sciences,” the idols in other countries are the math and science professionals. Izadi remembers that, “in high school, everyone wanted to be like the guy who scored the highest in math. The absolute best students in Iran would get accepted into a science and engineering program. It was a very big deal; people strived to get into the program.” With great opportunities in American higher education, and strong science-oriented backgrounds, international students flock to US universities and excel, gaining graduate and post-graduate degrees “because we could pursue it, and we never stopped.”
In contrast, Izadi remarks that too many American students, lacking a science background from their K-12 education, enter college and “find math, science, and engineering too difficult, challenging, and out of their reach. So some struggle and others don’t even try.”
As technology advances exponentially, engineers will stay in high demand, but “unless our schools support and encourage students with the potential, we will have a problem in this nation. We are facing a situation where employers cannot find the skill set they need in this country, so they move their jobs. The university educational system is by far the best; that cannot be said for K-12,” Dr. Izadi concludes.
Like many other Iranians interested in engineering, Baback Izadi traveled half-way across the world, exchanging his middle-class lifestyle in pre-revolution Iran for a quality university education in the United States. “Certainly, it was very difficult, living far away from home, but it also provided opportunity to be exposed, to learn a new culture, to experience what a classroom alone cannot provide.”
After obtaining his Bachelor’s degree, he was set upon moving back to Iran and finding a computer engineering job, but the Iranian Revolution stopped him in his tracks. Just like many other Iranians who were already in America pursuing higher education, he continued on to acquire his Master’s, and then his PhD, at Ohio State University.
Close proximity to friends and family in the US and opportunity to collaborate with industries, such as IBM, factored into his decision to accept an offer for professor at SUNY New Paltz. As one of the first faculty members in the newly-created Engineering department, Izadi found “a lot of opportunity to help form and shape the program.” Today, he continues to admire the instructional focus of the college.
As Department Chair of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Professor Izadi experiences the benefits and challenges of an expensive and expanding Engineering department on a comprehensive liberal arts campus. Izadi recognizes immense gains found in the school’s liberal arts requirements in combination with the intense Engineering tracks. “It helps our students develop these soft skills, which will enable them to not just get employed, but to stay employed, and to move up the corporate ladder. What helps engineers move into better positions are these courses in General Education and the Humanities, which develop their communication skills. They get an education not found in traditional engineering programs.”
To be sure, limited funding in a medium-size college restricts the courses, laboratories, and equipment available for expensive programs. Still, the department thrives and excels. “In the past several years, we revamped our engineering programs, and today I would place our program against any program in the US.” In the wake of great achievements, such as high praise during the accreditation process, a new Mechanical Engineering program is underway. Along with Wooster renovations, including new laboratories and facilities, recruiting and curriculum plans are “taking all of our attention.”
For his PhD, in the early 1990s, Professor Izadi worked on fault-tolerant computer systems. As multiprocessors powering large company servers cannot be merely shut down and repaired—imagine if Facebook or Google went offline for more than a minute—super computers must be designed to continue functioning even when a part of the system fails. The current challenge in the supercomputer community is to build the Exaflop computer which would have the ability to execute 1018 instructions per second. These supercomputers enable scientists to model nature—protein folding, the Big Bang, Earth’s Climate—like never before. Since estimates suggest close to a million processors to attain such computational power, the machine must be able to self-correct and manage, otherwise known as autonomic computing. Such a supercomputer is projected to consume about one megawatt of power, requiring a nuclear power plant in its vicinity. Therefore, Baback Izadi’s current research focuses on both the reliability and energy challenges of the supercomputer and data centers.
Engineering offers attractive job opportunities for graduates, but gender and cultural gaps deter growth in the field. Professor Izadi first commented on the difficulties for women: “In K-12 education, females are certainly not encouraged as much as male counterparts to pursue math and science. I talk to some high school graduates who have a very good math aptitude, and they haven’t even considered science or engineering.”
Along with lack of encouragement, labeling engineers as “geeks” and “nerds” further discourages women from the traditionally male-dominated field, since “people don’t want to be associated with those labels. It’s a great tragedy.” Furthermore, when women join the ranks, either as students or employees, the gender gap hurts their workplace experience, as “some women have indicated that they felt out of place, when they work in that environment. It’s not good for the country, for men and for women, that we don’t have equal proportions in programs across the country.”
Professor Izadi believes that encouraging more women to join the field will take time and a large cultural shift. Nationally, young adults are recognizing the huge job opportunities in the sciences when compared to humanities, but an economic recession does not increase the numbers by much. Even with concentrated efforts to encourage female engineers and accommodate their needs, gender ratios in engineering at SUNY New Paltz have not gotten much better: “the number of female students increased, not to the level we would like, around 10 to 15 percent.”
Similarly, despite slight increases during a national recession, only a small portion of Americans pursue engineering. With high starting salaries and four jobs available for every graduate, engineering seems like the obvious choice. Taking advantage of these opportunities, many international students pursue engineering programs at American universities, and often take their expertise and degrees back home overseas.
While our culture idolizes athletes and celebrities, placing “pressure on a lot of students to get into sports instead of sciences,” the idols in other countries are the math and science professionals. Izadi remembers that, “in high school, everyone wanted to be like the guy who scored the highest in math. The absolute best students in Iran would get accepted into a science and engineering program. It was a very big deal; people strived to get into the program.” With great opportunities in American higher education, and strong science-oriented backgrounds, international students flock to US universities and excel, gaining graduate and post-graduate degrees “because we could pursue it, and we never stopped.”
In contrast, Izadi remarks that too many American students, lacking a science background from their K-12 education, enter college and “find math, science, and engineering too difficult, challenging, and out of their reach. So some struggle and others don’t even try.”
As technology advances exponentially, engineers will stay in high demand, but “unless our schools support and encourage students with the potential, we will have a problem in this nation. We are facing a situation where employers cannot find the skill set they need in this country, so they move their jobs. The university educational system is by far the best; that cannot be said for K-12,” Dr. Izadi concludes.