Barry Van Veen earns IEEE Signal Processing Society education award

Barry Van Veen, the Lynn H. Matthias Professor Emeritus in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received the 2025 IEEE Signal Processing Society Carl Friedrich Gauss Education Award.

The award honors educators who have made pioneering and significant contributions to signal processing education.

Van Veen is a dedicated educator who is among the pioneers of the flipped (active-learning) classroom concept in the College of Engineering. He has won several teaching awards, including the 1997 Holdridge Teaching Excellence Award from the ECE department, the 2014 Harvey Spangler Award for Technology Enhanced Instruction and the 2017 Benjamin Smith Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Engineering, and the 2015 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from UW-Madison.  

Van Veen also served as the ECE associate chair for graduate and online studies, helping to rapidly grow the department’s accelerated master’s degree program. He spearheaded an overhaul of the PhD program, establishing uniform course requirements and replacing qualifying exams. Between 2015 and 2018, he led an education innovation committee that helped launch the College of Engineering makerspace and promoted research-based effective teaching practices.  

He also hosts the popular All Signal Processing YouTube channel, where he presents short lectures on topics in signal processing and he is an instructor in the College of Engineering Interdisciplinary Professional Programs, teaching courses in AI and machine learning.

Van Veen will receive the Gauss award during the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing which will take place in Barcelona, Spain, in May 2026.