Date: Monday, April 4, 2022
Time: 12:30 p.m. - 1:20 p.m.
Location: Van Leer, WC240
Speaker: Morris Cohen
Speaker’s Title: Associate Professor
Speaker’s Affiliation: ECE Georgia Tech
Seminar Title: So…what exactly do you professors and academics do anyways?
Abstract of Talk: When I tell people I’m a professor, often the first question is “what do you teach?” For many people teaching is the only picture of what professors do. As students in a top-tier research-heavy institution, you are aware that there is also the research piece of our jobs, which can be as big or bigger. You may or may not have a feel for what “research” is like, but even still you probably are missing various other aspects of what professors and academics actually do. This won’t be easy because “research and academia” looks very different from one school, or one lab, to the next. But, I’ll do my best to open up and (1) fill in those gaps, including the many pieces of an academic job, (2) go into the decision process I went into that landed me here, and (3) discuss why I love my job and would not change my career route, but at the same time this job is not for everyone (no job is, except maybe Senior Vice President of Ice Cream Tasting).
Biographical Sketch of the Speaker: Morris Cohen received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and 2010, respectively, and served as a research scientist there until August 2013. From September 2012 until August 2013, Dr. Cohen was appointed as AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation.
In Fall 2013, he joined the faculty in the School of ECE at Georgia Tech, with promotion and tenure as of Summer 2018. He was selected for the NSF CAREER award in 2017 and received the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2015. He is the winner of the 2014 Santimay Basu Prize by the International Union of Radio Science, an award given once per three years to an early career scientist. He also won Georgia Tech's Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2018. He is an author of more than 90 journal publications and 200 conference presentations. He serves as President of the Atmospheric and Space Electricity Section of the American Geophysical Union. He enjoys hiking, skiing, cooking, traveling, building pizza ovens, and writing biosketches.