Donald Snyder’s career in electrical & systems engineering to be celebrated April 25

Ulugbek Kamilov to be named Donald L. Snyder Career Development Professor

Beth Miller 04.25.2025

Pictured (l – r): Kamilov, Snyder

Donald L. Snyder, the late former chair of the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering (ESE), was described as a leader, an innovator and “extraordinarily accomplished.” A version of his novel image reconstruction approach he developed in the 1980s is still used today.

Snyder’s long career in research and administration, which began at Washington University in St. Louis in 1969, will be celebrated April 25 as part of ESE Day. Although he died in 2022, his contributions to the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering are still widely regarded. Snyder was principal investigator in the Biomedical Computer Laboratory at the WashU Medicine, where he participated in research with the late Jerome R. Cox Jr., a leader in applying advanced technology for introducing new treatments in biomedical engineering; Michel Ter-Pogossian, the founder of positron emission tomography (PET); and others to develop PET systems.

Snyder was the Samuel C. Sachs Professor of Electrical Engineering and chair of the ESE department from 1976 to 1986 as well as a professor of radiology at WashU Medicine. He became senior professor in 2003. He was one of the first researchers to bring together mathematical theory and physics modeling to design imaging systems. He and Cox have the first patent on X-ray CT technology with rotating gantries.

Not only was Snyder a leader in using advanced technology to solve problems, but he was a leader in academia, as well. He was the founding director of the Electronic Systems and Signals Research Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1986 to 1998. During this period, the lab grew to seven faculty, 25 graduate students and several undergraduate students working on fundamental aspects of imaging applied to biomedical, astronomical and remote-sensing problems. Snyder was a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, cited for “contributions to estimation theory and applications to communications and medicine.”

Snyder earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and 1966, respectively, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California in 1961. He was a U.S. Navy veteran who served during the Korean War.

As part of the celebration, Ulugbek Kamilov, an associate professor of electrical & systems engineering and of computer science & engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, will be installed as the inaugural Donald L. Snyder Career Development Professor. The Donald L. Snyder Career Development Professorship was established by the Snyder family via their donor advised fund.

Kamilov joined WashU in 2017 from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, where he was a research scientist. He earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in 2015, along with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the same institution. His academic journey also includes research visits to Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 and Stanford University in 2013.

Kamilov leads pioneering work in computational imaging, an interdisciplinary field that spans the design of imaging systems, physics-based modeling and data-driven analysis for biomedical and scientific applications. His research specifically focuses on advancing the theory and algorithms that underpin this field. His contributions have pushed the frontiers of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), optical microscopy, computational photography and remote sensing.

In 2024, Kamilov received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award for major contributions to theory and practice in computational imaging. His accolades also include an NSF CAREER Award, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Best Paper Award in 2017 and selection as one of 55 early-career researchers nationwide for the Scialog initiative on “Advancing Bioimaging" in 2021. His doctoral dissertation was a finalist for the EPFL Doctorate Award in 2016. Kamilov currently serves as a senior editorial board member of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and is an active member of Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) Technical Committee of IEEE Signal Processing Society.