Trac D. Tran is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, with research interests in the field of digital signal processing, particularly in sparse representation, sparse recovery, sampling, multi-rate systems, filter banks, transforms, wavelets, and their applications in signal analysis, compression, processing, and communications.
His pioneering research on integer-coefficient transforms and pre-/post-filtering operators has been adopted as critical components of Microsoft Windows Media Video 9 and JPEG XR – the latest international still-image compression standard ISO/IEC 29199-2.
Tran was the co-director (with Prof. J. L. Prince) of the 33rd Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS’99), Baltimore, MD, in March 1999. In the summer of 2002, he was an ASEE/ONR Summer Faculty Research Fellow at the Naval Air Warfare Center & Weapons Division (NAWCWD) at China Lake, California. He is currently a regular consultant for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland. He has served as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing as well as IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He was a former member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM TC) and is a current member of the IEEE Image Video and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) Technical Committee. He is currently serving his second term as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
He has won several awards and honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, a William H, Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award, and a Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Tran earned his BS and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1993 and 1994, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, in 1998—all in electrical engineering. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Whiting School in 1998.