Sheila S. Hemami, assistant professor and Kodak Term Professor of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, is the winner of the 2000 C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award from Eta Kappa Nu, the national electrical and computer engineering honor society.

The award is given annually to an outstanding young electrical engineering educator. Selection is made by a national jury of prominent educators.

Hemami is the third Cornell faculty member to receive the award, giving Cornell the most award winners in any single institution. Previous Cornell winners are Clifford Pollock, the I. and C. Lee Professor of Engineering, and C. Richard Johnson, professor of electrical engineering. Pollock nominated Hemami for this year's award. Last year Hemami received honorable mention for the award.

Hemami was educated at the University of Michigan (B.S.E.E, 1990) and Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1992; Ph.D., 1994). During her final year at Stanford, she was a member of the technical staff at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif. In 1995 she joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at Cornell where she currently directs the Visual Communications Laboratory. She received a National Science Foundation Career Award in 1997.

Hemami's research interests broadly concern communication of visual information. The information superhighway, she believes, provides an example of the flexibility required of image and video compression and transmission techniques. Varying network capacities, differences in viewing devices, and a broad spectrum of user needs suggest, she says, the desirability of coding techniques that can efficiently span large quality and bandwidth ranges. Hemami's topics of interest include multirate video coding and transmission, compression specific to packet and other data-compression networks, as well as psychovisual considerations.