Faculty Profiles

Professor Cosman is addressing a critical challenge for mobile video transmission: how to send video with high quality, in the face of noise, interference and limited bandwidth. As demand for streaming video and other multimedia grows, she says the goal is to design algorithms that allow for the most compression while still maintaining acceptable video quality. Cosman has funding from NSF, ONR, corporations and the UC Discovery Grant Program. She is involved with human observer experiments on packet loss visibility, cross-layer design problems optimizing algorithms across the application and physical layers, and video multiplexing algorithms. She is also involved in computer vision projects in the biological sciences, including ways to track and classify microscopic mutant worms. Cosman is particularly interested in engineering education, having participated on numerous advisory and steering committees to enhance educational excellence and boost the diversity of the Jacobs School's enrollment.

Capsule Bio:

Pamela Cosman joined UCSD in July 1995. She obtained her B.S. with Honor in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1989 and 1993, respectively. She was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota during 1993-1995. Since 1995, she has been with the faculty of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD, where she is currently a Professor. She was the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications from 2006 to 2008. She served as Associate Dean for Students from 2013 to 2016.  Dr. Cosman is the recipient of the ECE Departmental Graduate Teaching Award, a Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a Powell Faculty Fellowship, and a Globecom 2008 Best Paper Award. She was the Editor-in-Chief (2006-2009) of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and an associate editor of several other journals. She is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, and a Fellow of the IEEE. She is the author of over 150 papers and book chapters in the areas of image/video compression, image quality evaluation,and biomedical image processing.