Sevgi Zubeyde Gurbuz

Biography

Dr. Sevgi Z. Gurbuz received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering with minor in mechanical engineering and the M.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2009.  She served as an active duty officer in the USAF from June 1998 to January 2004, during which time she was stationed as a 62E R&D Engineer at the U.S. U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Sensors Directorate, Rome, NY.  In 2003, she was deployed 6 months as an interpreter to Diyarbakir, Turkey.  After completing her PhD, she was a research scientist at TUBITAK Space Technologies Research Institute and assistant professor at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, Turkey.  More recently, she was an Assistant Professor (Aug. 2017 – Aug. 2024) and Associate Professor (Aug.-Dec. 2024) at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Since Jan. 2025, Dr. Gurbuz has been an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC, USA.

At NCSU, she leads the Lab for Computational Intelligence in Radar (CI4R), where her main focus of research lies in the advancement of RF-enabled Cyber-Physical Human Systems (CPHS), radar signal processing and machine learning algorithms to address the challenges of robust, accurate human micro-Doppler signature analysis, automatic target recognition (ATR) and control of CPHS for automotive, health, human computer-interaction, and defense applications.  She has pioneered radar-based American Sign Language (ASL) recognition, for which she was awarded a patent in 2022, and is developing novel, interactive RF sensing paradigms built upon physics-aware machine learning and fully-adaptive (cognitive) radar that provide for unique AI/ML solutions to radar perception problems.

Education

• Ph.D. 2009
  Electrical and Computer Engineering
  Georgia Institute of Technology
• Master's 2000
  Electrical Engineering
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Bachelor's 1998
  Electrical Engineering with Minor in Mechanical Engineering
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Involvement

• IEEE Radar Systems Panel (2020 - present)
  Member
• IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems
  Associate Editor
• IEEE Transactions on Radar Systems
  Associate Editor
• IET Radar, Sonar and Navigation
  Editorial Board Member

Awards & Honors