Five questions with Pam Cosman, UCSD electrical engineer and newly elected IEEE Fellow

For her contributions to image and video compression and wireless communications, Pamela Cosman, an electrical engineering professor from UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, has been elected an IEEE fellow.

Cosman is the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications at the Jacobs School and the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

Video: Pam Cosman discusses her work and experiences as a female engineering student (length: 05:30

Video: Pam Cosman discusses her work, her IEEE Fellows award, and views on the future of engineering (length: 06:30) Note: the first minute of these two videos is identical.

Did you ever feel like a minority during your engineering training?
Did I ever not feel that way? [laughs] It was inescapable. When you were taking an engineering class as a woman, you felt like you were sticking out like a sore thumb. Many times I had the experience where I would ask a question and seven or eight months later, somebody might say to me 'hey, weren't you the person who asked that question in that class?' I think the only reason they remembered me is because I was a woman. And so you feel really conspicuous and you feel that if you open your mouth you have to say something clever because people are not going to forget it or just let it pass by the way they would with a male student.

Did these experiences affect the way you interact with students here at the Jacobs School?
I think they do. Certainly in class I tell people that I really encourage them to come to office hours, that I really like to meet them in office hours, and that I'm happy to accept questions also by email. I want to encourage people to ask questions and to feel that there is not an unbridgeable gap between them and the professor.

Do you feel there are missed opportunities with regard to women and underrepresented minorities entering the fields of engineering?
There are a lot of women who know very little about engineering and are just sort of put off by trying to learn anything about it. The gender gap starts really early, probably in middle school. There are opportunities starting at middle school and continuing through high school, undergraduate and graduate education to make a difference by providing role models and giving women the experience of what it can be like so that it's not a big unknown. Setting up peer groups so that women don't feel isolated is another good thing. There are a lot of things we can do.

Can you talk a little about your experiences as a woman in your editor-in-chief position at the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications?
Being the editor-in-chief of a journal, I think it has really not mattered what the gender is at all. And probably like a lot of journals, it is all run electronically, and so you're sending things out for review through email, you're contacting the various editors through email and so you never even see people. I would say that's an arena where it has mattered less than anything else I do what someone's gender is.

That said, do you think engineering papers written by women are reviewed more harshly than papers written by men?
Scientific studies have demonstrated that papers and grant proposals written by women are reviewed more harshly. The various studies that people have done – where you have the very same paper, or resume or essay or whatever it is, and you have a man's name on it or a woman's name on it and you see how people rate it – definitely shows that people are more critical of women and undervalue what they are writing. There is no question that that happens. You can't point to any specific paper and be sure it has happened in that particular case. It's just that statistically we know that this is going on.

You can read a general description of Pam Cosman's work here, and a more detailed description of decoders, encoders and the challenges of video compression in a wireless environment here.