Birsen Yazıcı received BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics in 1988 from Bogazici University, Istanbul Turkey and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering both from Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. From September 1994 until 2000, she was a research engineer at General Electric Company Global Research Center, Schenectady NY. During her tenure in industry, she worked on radar, transportation, industrial and medical imaging systems. From 2001 to June 2003, she was an assistant professor at Drexel University, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. In Fall 2003, she joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she is currently a full professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering. Prof. Yazıcı’s research interests span the areas of inverse problems in wave-based imaging, image reconstruction, machine learning, radar and X-ray imaging. In the area of radar, her research interests include the mathematical foundations of synthetic aperture radar, multi-static imaging, moving target imaging, passive radar, imaging in complex environments, deep learning for radar, non-convex optimization for radar and phaseless imaging.
She served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing from 2008 to 2012, and for SIAM Journal on Imaging Science from 2010-2014, IEEE Transactions on Geosciences and Remote sensing from 2014 to 2018. She currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. She is an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committees on Sensor Array Multichannel, 2018-2020; Signal Processing Theory and Methods 2015-2019; and Computational Imaging 2018-2021. She is the recipient of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Engineering Research Excellence Awards in 2007 and 2013. She holds 11 US patents.