Athina P. Petropulu is Distinguished Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rutgers, having served as chair of the department during 2010-2016.  Prior to joining Rutgers she was a Professor of ECE at Drexel University (1992-2010). She held Visiting Scholar appointments at SUPELEC, Universite’ Paris Sud, Princeton University and University of Southern California. Dr. Petropulu's research interests span the area of statistical signal processing, wireless communications, signal processing in networking, physical layer security, and radar signal processing. Her research has been funded by various government industry sponsors including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval research, the US Army, the National Institute of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Dr. Petropulu is Fellow of IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and recipient of the 1995 Presidential Faculty Fellow Award given by NSF and the White House. She is 2022-2023 President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2009-2011) and IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President-Conferences (2006-2008). She was Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), General Co-Chair of the 2018 IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), and General Chair of the 2005 ICASSP. She was Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Aerospace & Electronics Systems Society. She is recipient of the 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award, and co-recipient of the 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (B. Li), the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (F. Liu), the 2021 Barry Carlton Best Paper Award by IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, and the 2023 Stephen O. Rice Prize Best Paper Award by the IEEE Communications Society.