Deans and Administrators

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C. L. Max Nikias

Dean, Viterbi School of Engineering
University of Southern California

As Dean of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, Dr. Nikias leads a School that is consistently ranked among the top ten Engineering Schools in the United States. Dr. Nikias became Dean of the School on July 1, 2001. He is also the holder of the Z. A. Kaprielian Chair in Engineering.

The School of Engineering at the University of Southern California has 165 tenure-track faculty, 75 research faculty, 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students and more than $135 million dollars annually funded research programs. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is the home of the Information Sciences Institute, the Department of Homeland Security's first Research Center of Excellence, and of two active National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERC) on integrated media systems and biomedical technology.

Dr. Nikias was the Director of the NSF ERC on Integrated Media Systems from 1996 to 2001. He has also been Professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems at the University of Southern California since 1991. He was Associate Dean of Engineering at USC from 1992 until his appointment as Dean in 2001. Before coming to USC, he held academic appointments as Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University and the University of Connecticut.

In championing the media and communication paradigms as IMSC Director, Dr. Nikias drew from his fundamental research in digital signal processing, which is at the core of multimedia and communication technologies. In addition to multimedia, his research interests include statistical signal processing applications to digital communications, radar and sonar and biomedical signal analysis. He is the author of more than 100 published journal papers, 180 conference papers, 3 textbooks and 8 patents. He has mentored 22 Ph.D. students. He has consulted extensively for the Department of Defense during the past 15 years.

As a result of Dr. Nikias's major scholarly research achievements, he was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1991 at the age of 38. Fewer than 2 percent of the 350,000 members of IEEE around the world have received the highest honor of Fellow. Five percent of those, or about 260, were 38 years old or younger at the time. He also received top awards from three research papers. His publication on the parametric bispectrum received the prestigious IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award in 1988. He received the "Fred W. Ellersick Award of Outstanding Unclassified Paper at Military Communications (MILCOM) '92" for his work in blind equalization for mobile digital communications. He also received the 2002 IEE A H Reeves Premium Award for his work on array signal processing. He was also the recipient of the 1993 Outstanding Teacher Award from the National Technological University (distance learning university in USA). He is a member of Phi Kappa Phi.

Dr. Nikias is a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST). In January 2000, the California Governor formally commended Dr. Nikias for helping California successfully meet the challenge of the new millennium through cutting-edge research. In May 2001, Dr. Nikias was honored by Loyola Marymount University for his contributions to science and engineering. He became a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Science in 2002.