Vice Provost for International Initiatives

Dr. Steven McLaughlin

Georgia Tech's mission is to "define the technological research university of the 21st century." Our global reach plays a major role in fulfilling that mission and international programs not only in education, but in research and economic development are rapidly expanding as a result. The Vice Provost for International Initiatives is the point person at Georgia Tech for all international initiatives. In this role he works closely with all units on campus to ensure that the Institute's global efforts in education, research, and economic development meet the highest standard of excellence.

About Dr. McLaughlin

Steven W. McLaughlin received the B.S. degree from Northwestern University in 1985, the M.S.E. degree from Princeton University in 1986, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1992, all in electrical engineering. From 1992-1996 he was on the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in September 1996 where he is now the Ken Byers Professor of ECE. He was previously Deputy Director of Georgia Tech Lorraine—the European Campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology—in Metz, France.

He was the first Georgia Tech recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) where he was cited by President Bill Clinton "for leadership in the development of high-capacity, nonbinary optical recording formats." He also received the National Science Foundation CAREER award for this work. He received (with Dr. David Warland at UC-Davis) the Information Storage Industries Consortium Technical Achievement Award in 2002 for "pioneering work in the development of multilevel optical disk storage technology." From 1999-2003 he was also the Principal Scientist for Calimetrics where this work was commercialized (Calimetrics was acquired by LSI Logic in 2005).

He received the Friend of the Graduate Student Award in 2002 from the Georgia Tech Graduate Student Association. His research interests are in the general area of communications and information theory. He has published more than two hundred papers in journals and conferences and holds twenty-six US patents. He has served as the research and thesis advisor to more than fifty students at the bachelors, masters, doctoral and post-doctoral levels. In 2005, he was President of the IEEE Information Theory Society and he is a Fellow of the IEEE.