ECE Associate Professor Named Jefferson Science Fellow
Robert Butera, Associate Professor in ECE, was recently named a 2008 Jefferson Science Fellow by the U.S. Department of State. Tenured academic scientists and engineers from U.S. institutions of higher learning are eligible for selection to be Jefferson Science Fellows. Each Fellow will spend one year at the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for an on-site assignment in Washington, D.C. The assignment may also involve extended stays at U.S. foreign embassies and/or missions.
Robert Butera received his BEE from Georgia Tech in 1991. He attended graduate school at Rice University in Houston, TX, receiving the MSEE in 1994 and PhD in 1996. Following graduate school, Butera did postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. While at the NIH he worked jointly in the Mathematical Research Branch and the Laboratory for Neural Control. Since 1999 Butera has been on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since 2005, Butera has chaired the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program, which has over 150 PhD students from participating units in the College of Engineering, including ECE. His primary research is in the fields of neuroengineering, physiological modeling, and real-time instrumentation.
The Jefferson Science Fellows program was started in 2003 at the U.S. Department of State to establish a new model for engaging the American academic science, technology and engineering communities in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. The Jefferson Science Fellows program is administered by the National Academies and supported through a partnership between American philanthropic foundations (the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation).