Phillip De Leon is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Chief Research Officer at the University of Colorado Denver and a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Education

Phillip De Leon received the B.S. Electrical Engineering and the B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1989 and 1990 respectively. He was awarded the AT&T Bell Laboratories Cooperative Research Doctoral Fellowship in 1990 and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, in 1992 and 1995 respectively.

Experience

Prior to retiring from New Mexico State University in 2022, Phillip De Leon held the Paul W. and Valerie Klipsch Distinguished Professorship in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and served as the Associate Vice President for Research and Chief Science Officer.

While at NMSU he was Associate Director for the Center for Space Telemetering and Telecommunications (1999 – 2003), Chair of the University Research Council (2010-2011), and Associate Department Head (2011-2013). He served as Associate Dean of Research in the College of Engineering (2016-2019) where he oversaw historic growth in research expenditures and research grant awards.

He has been a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland (2002, 2022); Multimedia Communications Department at EURECOM Campus SophiaTech, France (2016); and Signal and Image Processing Department at Paris Institute of Technology (Telecom ParisTech) (2016). He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering, Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien), Austria (2008) and a faculty fellow at the Sandia National Laboratories (2016-2023). Phillip is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Teaching and Research

A signal processing engineer by training, Phillip De Leon has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in adaptive signal processing, advanced linear systems, digital speech processing, DSP, embedded DSP, mobile application development (iOS), pattern recognition and machine learning, quantum computing, and signals and systems. He has supervised the research of over 35 graduate students. His research has been supported by federal agencies (Air Force Research Laboratories, Army Research Laboratory, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NASA), Sandia National Laboratories, and industry.  He has published over 85 papers in international journals and conferences and has eight U.S. Patents. His broad work is in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) with specific research interests in cybersecurity (voice authentication), machine learning, speech processing, and time-frequency analysis.

Awards

Phillip De Leon was the recipient of the Paul W. and Valerie Klipsch Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2015 – 2022), John and Tome Nakayama Professorship in Engineering for Teaching Excellence (2012 – 2015), Foreman Faculty Excellence Award (2014), Bromilow Award for Research (2010), and a Fulbright Faculty Scholar Award from the United States Department of State (2008). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Pi Mu Epsilon honor societies.