BIOGRAPHY

Mel White completed her PhD at Cornell University in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2022, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient.  Mel’s career began in economic development and public policy, earning a BA in International Relations from the College of William & Mary, and serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco.  She later transitioned to STEM, completing a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a non-traditional student. 

Mel’s research interests lie at the intersection of integrated circuit design, computational imaging, and signal processing, leveraging interdisciplinary techniques to reinvent conventional imaging pipelines.  Her graduate work centered on the design of novel imaging sensors built in standard CMOS, and her work has been published in various conferences on circuits and computer vision.  As a Rice Academy Fellow, she is integrating her prior work with lensless imaging, compressed sensing, and machine learning under the direction of Drs. Ashok Veeraraghavan and Rich Baraniuk.  This effort is toward the goal of democratizing access to healthcare via low-cost, lightweight, and flexible imaging systems for biomedical devices and histopathology. 

Beyond the lab, Mel is invested in STEM outreach within and beyond academia.  At Cornell, she designed, taught, and piloted several programs for K-12 students and teachers at Cornell and local schools, and taught a math course at a prison.  In her free time she enjoys being outdoors, learning about fungi, and going for bike rides.