Laura Balzano: 2024 Early Career Award recipient

PhDECE ’12 (BSECE ’01, Rice University; MSECE ’07, University of California, Los Angeles)
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan

An electrical and computer engineer recognized for advances in signal processing, machine learning and optimization, and for her holistic approach to teaching and mentoring excellence.

Laura Balzano is an associate professor at the University of Michigan and rising star focusing on statistical signal processing, optimization and deep learning. She is internationally recognized for her work in modeling and applying real-world “messy” big data, or data that is incomplete, corrupted or uncalibrated, to a wide array of scientific problems.

She has earned many accolades, including a rare trifecta of early-career awards, including a 2019 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a 2018 Air Force Office Scientific Research Young Investigator Award and a 2018 Army Research Office Young Investigator Program award.

Balzano grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, where she says encounters with women engineers—including a nurse changing careers in midlife and a friend’s mom—led her to the discipline. She attended Rice University and, after a brief stint as a software engineer, she pursued her master’s degree at UCLA before joining Rob Nowak’s lab at UW-Madison for her PhD research.

“I worked on so many different interesting machine learning problems,” she says. “I was really interested in algorithms and the kind of problems that are motivated by real-world applications like environmental sensing and computer vision.”

Balzano joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 2013, and also spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2019 to 2020.

Balzano has earned accolades as an outstanding teacher and advocate for women and traditionally underrepresented students as well. “It can be challenging to see a student who’s struggling and to know how to meet them where they are and how to help them,” she says. “But that’s something that’s really important to me, and I do my best within my teaching.”

Which engineering professor made the greatest impact on you?

That’s no contest; Rob Nowak had the biggest impact on me and not just in his role as my PhD advisor. I took a class he teaches on statistical learning theory and it was just absolutely fascinating. He brought the most advanced topics in research into the classroom and taught them in a way so we could see them step by step and in detail. He was inspiring in the lab, too. He set a great example where we were all engaged and excited to talk to each other.

How did your engineering education enable your success?

It was the culture at Wisconsin that allowed me to excel at being a professor because it was so collaborative. We had seminars in ECE and the WID and we’d meet on the Terrace. It was always a rich environment for discussion; people shared ideas freely and engaged with each other and weren’t afraid to talk about research or just anything. It built a community that let us learn and figure out how to decide which ideas are exciting.

Which do you prefer?

Winter or summer in Madison?
That’s really hard! In winter I went snowshoeing and I bought a snowboard for like $30 at the Hoofer sale and went to Cascade Mountain for two hours most Saturdays, all winter. And then in summer I took sailing classes, I loved to cycle through the Arb, and sit at the Terrace. It’s just a magical, wonderful place in summer.

UW Arboretum or Picnic Point?
I will say the Arboretum. But I also loved walking to Picnic Point across the ice on Lake Mendota.

Orange custard chocolate chip, or something else?
Definitely the orange custard chocolate chip. We got it lots of times. It’s delicious.