Indira Chatterjee

Indira Chatterjee

Interim Dean; Foundation Professor of Electrical & Biomedical Engineering

Summary

As associate dean of engineering, Dr. Chatterjee oversees undergraduate  and graduate education within the college, including assessment, accreditation, recruitment, retention, advising, outreach and career placement. This includes co-chairing the College of Engineering Courses and Curriculum Committee, interacting with advisement, recruiting and outreach personnel; providing leadership to improve retention and graduation rates to meet College and University goals; participation in the preparation and reporting for ABET visits; and serving on University and College committees.

She also coordinates efforts to expand the research productivity of the College of Engineering. This includes facilitating industry partnerships, facilitating the annual event Innovation Day, identifying and promoting opportunities for competitive research grants, providing coordination and leadership for research teams to respond to these opportunities, acting as liaison between the college and the Office of Sponsored Projects, and working with the Dean on strategic planning.

Professional experience

Dr. Chatterjee has been a member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society since the late 1970's and has attended and presented papers at the annual meetings of the society since her graduate student days. She has also served several times as a member of the BEMS Technical Program Committee and reviewed abstracts for the conference as well as co-chaired technical sessions. She has published over 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and presented as many papers at international conferences.

Dr. Chatterjee is also a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a member of the IEEE MTT-10 committee and a member of the Editorial Board of the Bioelectromagnetics Journal. She has served in the past on the Board of Directors of the Bioelectromagnetics Society. She is also a member of the American Society for Engineering Education.

Mentoring

Dr. Chatterjee has served as research mentor to postdoctoral fellows and many M.S. and Ph.D. graduate and undergraduate students, and as an academic advisor to many hundreds of electrical engineering students. Most of her graduate students are well-employed in industry and academia, and she also served for many years as the internship coordinator for the Department of Electrical & Biomedical Engineering. She has been the faculty advisor to the University of Nevada, Reno collegiate section of the Society of Women Engineers for the past 34 years.

Dr. Chatterjee has been actively involved in research in the area of bioelectromagnetics since her graduate student days at Utah in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the mentorship of Professor Om Gandhi.

In the past, her research interests have included radiofrequency and microwave experimental and numerical dosimetry of the human body, human body impedance and induced current measurements and computations in the VLF to MF band and the bioeffects of 60 Hz fields on cells funded by the National Institutes of Health.

For more than 25 years, she and her colleague Dr. Gale Craviso of the University of Nevada School of Medicine have been funded continuously by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to investigate the effects of radiofrequency, microwave millimeter wave fields on catecholamine release from chromaffin cells and on alterations in skeletal muscle contraction as well as for research involving the effects of high-intensity nanosecond pulses on chromaffin cells.

She has been the principal investigator or co- investigator on research grants totaling over $7 million from Johns Hopkins University, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, GE Energy and the National Science Foundation. (She was principal investigator on a $210,000 Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) grant where she got trained as an engineering education researcher, and the principal investigator on a $1 million S-STEM grant.)