Elevating your IEEE membership is more than just a title change; it is a prestigious recognition of your technical excellence and enduring impact within the global engineering community. The IEEE Signal Processing Society is dedicated to championing these elevations because celebrating the growth and mastery of our members reinforces our position as the world’s premier community for signal processing innovation.
The IEEE Senior Member grade is the highest professional rank you can apply for, recognizing technical leadership and professional maturity. This elevation honors your achievements and marks you as a leader within the global Signal Processing community.
Why Elevate?
Achieving Senior Member status is a milestone that unlocks exclusive professional benefits:
- Global Recognition: A peer-acknowledged mark of excellence and professional maturity.
- Leadership Opportunities: Required for many executive volunteer roles within IEEE.
- Exclusive Rewards: Receive a wood-and-bronze plaque, a letter of commendation to your employer, and a voucher to join one new IEEE Society for free.
Requirements & Support
To qualify, you need 10 years of professional experience (including your degree years) and 5 years of significant performance in the field. You also require three references from current IEEE Senior Members, Fellow, or Honorary Member grade.
How the IEEE Signal Processing Society Helps: If you need assistance finding references, the Society can bridge the gap. We can connect you with Signal Processing Society Chapter Chairs or mentors in your technical area who can review your work and serve as your professional references.
Take the Next Step
You can self-nominate at any time. For full application details and requirements, visit the official IEEE Senior Member webpage.
The IEEE Fellow grade recognizes individuals with an extraordinary record of accomplishment in any of the IEEE fields of interest.
Elevating to Fellow is a prestigious milestone that honors your technical achievements and the significant value you’ve brought to the global community.
Who Qualifies?
To be considered for the grade of Fellow, at the time of nomination, you must:
- Hold IEEE Senior Member or IEEE Life Senior Member grade
- Have 15 years or more of professional experience
- Have completed a minimum of five cumulative years of IEEE membership in any grade preceding 1 January of the year of elevation.
Note: IEEE Society affiliate membership does not apply; the five years of membership is calculated on a cumulative basis, and they do not need to be consecutive.
Nominations
Each year, the IEEE Signal Processing Society receives many nominations, with about one-third of them reaching elevation. To improve your chances:
- Review the IEEE Fellow Grade Nomination Categories
- Focus on Two Main Contributions: Do not list more than two major technical achievements.
- Show Concrete Evidence: Support your claims with papers, patents, standards, or widely adopted textbooks.
- Demonstrate Lasting Impact: Explain how your work changed the profession or opened new research avenues.
- Write for Non-Experts: While your nomination is reviewed by experts, your reference letters should be clear enough to impress the broader IEEE-level committee.
Important Deadlines
- Early February: Deadline for all online nominations.
- Late November: The new class of IEEE Fellows is officially announced.
SPS MEMBERS ELEVATED TO FELLOW
Each year, the IEEE Board of Directors confers the grade of Fellow on up to one-tenth of one percent of the voting members. To qualify for consideration, an individual must have been a Member, normally for five years or more, and a Senior Member at the time for nomination to Fellow. The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in IEEE’s designated fields.
The Signal Processing Society congratulates the following 56 SPS members who were recognized with the grade of Fellow as of 1 January 2025:
Balu Adsumilli, for contributions to video processing and pervasive user-generated online video content
Tareq Al-Naffouri, for contributions to adaptive signal processing and applications to wireless communications
Waheed Uz Zaman Bajwa, for contributions to compressed sensing, communications, and machine learning in distributed systems
Paolo Braca, for contributions to advancements in networked surveillance systems
Liangliang Cao, for contributions to computer vision and speech recognition with significant industrial impacts
Pin-Yu Chen, for contributions to machine learning robustness and AI safety
Kyungwhoon Cheun, for leadership in 5G mmWave and vRAN technologies
Davide Dardari, for contributions to theory and practice of radio positioning systems
Tiago Falk, for contributions to cognitive computing for adaptive, context-aware human-machine systems
Tim Fingscheidt, for contributions to speech enhancement systems and their evaluation
Carlo Fischione, for contributions to the theory and practice of wireless internet of things
Sinan Gezici, for contributions to wireless localization and ultra-wideband systems
Nuria Gonzalez Prelcic, for contributions to millimeter wave wireless communications
Ran He, for contributions to face analysis and image synthesis
Mingyi Hong, for contributions to optimization in signal processing, wireless communication and machine learning
Jiankun Hu, for contributions to biometrics security and anomaly intrusion detection
Yongming Huang, for contributions to signal processing for mmWave and MIMO wireless communications
Roozbeh Jafari, for contributions to sensors and systems for digital health paradigms
Krzysztof Kulpa, for contributions to passive radar
Bennett Landman, for contributions to MRI harmonization and data-driven modelling in medical image processing
Sanghoon Lee, for contributions to the modeling of human visual perception and processing of visual signals
Jinyu Li, for contributions to deep-learning-based speech technology innovation and commercialization
Jiaying Liu, for contributions to intelligent visual compression and enhancement
Karen Livescu, for contributions to multi-view and pre-trained speech representation learning
Sebastien Marcel, for contributions to biometric presentation attack detection
Santiago Marco, for contributions to the use of signal processing and machine learning in chemical sensing systems
Vishal Monga, for contributions to computationally efficient image analysis and restoration
Pedro Moreno, for contributions to speech recognition and industrial-scale internationalization of automated speech processing
Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, for contributions to design and analysis of hardware security primitives
Timothy O’Shea, for contributions to deep learning for physical layer communications and sensing
Ram Bilas Pachori, for contributions to application of signal decomposition methods to biomedical engineering
Wen-Hsiao Peng, for contributions to the design and implementation of video coding algorithms and standards
Dai Qionghai, for contributions to 3D content understanding and computational imaging
Philip Rubin, for contributions in speech synthesis and analysis, neuroscience, and ethics of research and technology
Luca Sanguinetti, for contributions to signal processing of multi-antenna and multi-cell wireless communications
Michael Lewis Seltzer, for contributions to speech recognition
Abdallah Shami, for contributions to methods for virtualized networks and optical access design
Zhiguo Shi, for contributions to array signal processing with applications to UAV surveillance
Byonghyo Shim, for contributions to sparse signal processing and multi-antenna technology
Teruhiko Suzuki, for contributions to video coding for professional and consumer products
Thomas Szabo, for contributions to ultrasound education and establishing technical standards
Dong Tian, for contributions to 3D video compression, processing, and analysis
Gordon Wetzstein, for contributions to computational imaging and display systems
Liang Xiao, for contributions to learning based wireless security
Hongkai Xiong, for contributions to multi-scale multimedia signal representation, coding and communication
Wei Xu, for contributions to hybrid MIMO transceiver design and distributed optimization for wireless networks
Jie Xu, for contributions to wireless information and power transfer and unmanned aerial vehicle enabled wireless networks
Jianhua Yao, for contributions to computer aided diagnosis, computational genomics and healthcare AI product development
Lei Ying, for contributions to fast magnetic resonance imaging with sparse sampling
Mika Ylianttila, for contributions to mobility management and network security
Alessio Zappone, for contributions to the energy-efficient design of wireless communication networks
Heiga Zen, for contributions to generative model-based speech synthesis
Guangtao Zhai, for contributions to perceptual quality assessment and enhancement of visual media
Xinmiao Zhang, for contributions to error-correcting codes and VLSI implementations
Wanlei Zhou, for contributions to cyber security and privacy
Jie Zhou, for contributions to visual content recognition and search
All SPS Fellows can be found here.
