Jenelle Piepmeier

[Ph.D. ME 1999]
Associate Professor
United States Naval Academy
Annapolis, Maryland

I really wanted to live in Atlanta, and I was excited about the opportunities for study and research at the Woodruff School. I saw professors using cameras and robots and that was the area of study I wanted to pursue. It is now the area in which I teach and research.

The practical nature of my work/research at GTRI really prepared me for my academic role at the Naval Academy. We don't have teaching assistants, and the hands-on skills I learned about interfacing equipment with computers have helped me immensely with guiding students through laboratory exercises and design projects. I loved Steve Dickerson's machine vision course that I took my first semester in graduate school, and I have developed a similar undergraduate course with a colleague here at the Naval Academy.

My advisor, Harvey Lipkin, was supremely helpful in guiding me through the process of writing my thesis and subsequent journal articles and conference papers. Even after graduation, he has been very helpful in collaborating on articles. When I tell people I have a Ph.D. from the Woodruff School at Georgia Tech, the impressed look on their faces indicates the respect that the program has earned. As a student, I was aware that students from other majors got far less departmental support. I'm not just referring to monetary support; the writing, funding, how-to-passthe-qualifiers, and how-to-land-a-job seminars were very beneficial to me. I've also read books and articles documenting nightmarish experiences for female engineering graduate students at other schools, but they were not experiences to which I could relate. I always felt like I was treated with dignity and fairness by the Woodruff faculty.

I absolutely loved living in Atlanta. I loved sailing with the Georgia Tech Sailing Club, eating in Thai restaurants, and prowling through the Buckhead estate sales in search of a bargain.