Lacra Pavel is a full-time Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), as well as a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, Communication Society, Laser and Electro-Optics Society, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and Optical Society of America. Her areas of specialty center around control systems and communications, fields in which, over the past decade, she has served on many academic committees and review boards for conferences and journals. Dr. Pavel has earned five patents for her work, and published scores of articles and papers in international engineering journals.