KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Dr. Nariman Farvardin
President
Stevens Institute of Technology
Dr. Nariman Farvardin is the seventh president of Stevens Institute of Technology. Since joining Stevens in 2011, Dr. Farvardin has been the driving force behind two ambitious 10-year strategic plans. Under his leadership, Stevens has experienced record enrollment, academic excellence, retention, graduation rates and research funding. Philanthropic support has grown and financial health has improved significantly, leading to major investments in campus infrastructure and a renewed focus on societal impact. Dr. Farvardin holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined the University of Maryland faculty as assistant professor in 1984, rising to provost in 2007. His research interests include information theory, multimedia signal compression and transmission, and wireless networks. Dr. Farvardin is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, holds seven U.S. patents and has co-authored more than 150 technical papers. He credits Claude Shannon as his foremost intellectual influence.
PANEL MODERATOR
Mr. John Horgan
Teaching Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for Science Writings
Stevens Institute of Technology
John Horgan is a teaching assistant professor and Director of the Center for Science Writings at the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Stevens Institute of Technology. He holds an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University School of Journalism and a B.A. in English from Columbia University School of General Studies. A prolific science journalist, he has contributed work to publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and Scientific American, among many others. Horgan has published more than 600 articles and seven books, including the best-selling The End of Science. He is a two-time winner of the Science Journalism Award and received the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. In 2023, he launched the online journal Cross-Check.
PANELIST
Dr. Brendan Englot
Associate Professor, Geoffrey S. Inman Junior Professor and Director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence Stevens Institute of Technology
Brendan Englot is associate professor, Geoffrey S. Inman Junior Professor and director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Stevens Institute of Technology. He received S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, where he studied motion planning for surveillance and inspection applications, deploying his algorithms on an underwater robot to inspect Navy and Coast Guard ships. From 2012 to 2014, at the United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut, Englot was a research scientist and principal investigator in the Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory and a technical contributor to the Sikorsky Autonomous Research Aircraft. He joined Stevens in 2014. He is the recipient of a 2017 NSF CAREER Award and a 2020 ONR Young Investigator Award.
PANELIST
Dr. Igor Pikovski
Assistant Professor and Stevens Presidential Fellow
Stevens Institute of Technology
Igor Pikovski is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology. He earned a diploma in physics from the Free University of Berlin / UCSB and his Ph.D. in quantum physics from the University of Vienna. From 2014 to 2018, Pikovski held a postdoctoral position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard University. He joined Stevens in 2018, where his research group delves into quantum phenomena, with a focus on quantum sensing, macroscopic quantum systems and the interplay of quantum physics with gravity. In 2023, Pikovski was recognized with both a Presidential Fellowship at Stevens Institute of Technology and the NSF CAREER Award.
OPENING REMARKS
Dr. Mary Ann Hellrigel
Institutional Historian and Archivist
IEEE History Center
Since January 2016, Mary Ann Hellrigel, Ph.D. has served as the Institutional Historian, Archivist and Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center as well as the manager of the oral history program. She is the recipient of the IEEE Fellowship in Electrical History, 1993-1994. Mary Ann has a bachelor's degree in History and Biology from Rutgers University (1983); a master's degree in Public History from UC-Santa Barbara (1989); and a Ph.D. in History of Technology and Science from Case Western Reserve University. She served as a Research Associate and editor at the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, and for more than 30 years, she taught history, women’s history, American Studies and geography at universities in the USA, including at Stevens Institute of Technology; California State University, Chico; New Jersey Institute of Technology; Iowa State University; and The State University of New York, College at Geneseo. Mary Ann has widely published and presented papers on Edison and early electric power and has consulted on related exhibits and documentaries.