Alice Cline Parker is an American electrical engineer. Her early research studied electronic design automation; later in her career, her interests shifted to neuromorphic engineering, biomimetic architecture for computer vision, analog circuits, carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, and nanotechnology.^[1][2][3][4] She is Dean's Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California.^[5]

Education and career

Parker's father, Joseph K. Cline, was a biochemist who (with Robert R. Williams) first synthesized thiamine; because of him, she grew up interested in science from a young age.^[2][4] Her parents divorced when she was young, and had no money to put her through college;^[4] her career in engineering was set by a high school physics teacher, who encouraged her to apply for an engineering scholarship, with which she supported her education.^[2][4] She became one of two female engineering students at North Carolina State University (NCSU),^[4] where Wayland P. Seagraves became a mentor.^[1][4]

After graduating from NCSU in 1970,^[1] Parker went to Stanford University on an NSF Fellowship,^[4] but was frustrated by her inability to find a faculty member who worked on brain modeling; Stanford professor Michael A. Arbib, who worked in this area, had recently moved to another university.^[4] She earned a master's degree in electrical engineering there,^[5] before marrying and following her new husband back to North Carolina. Still unable to find a research program in biomedical engineering, she returned to graduate study in computer engineering at NCSU, working on microprogrammable computer architecture with James W. Gault,^[4] and completing her Ph.D. in 1975.^[5][6]

She was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 1975 to 1980,^[7] recruited there by Angel G. Jordan, and began working in high-level synthesis, the automated design of computer hardware from an algorithm describing its intended behavior.^[4] In 1980, she moved to the University of Southern California,^[7] on the recommendation of her Army Research Office grant officer, Jimmie Suttle.^[4] She has been a full professor since 1991,^[7] and has served the university as Vice Provost for Research and Vice Provost of Graduate Studies.^[4]

Recognition

Parker was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1991, "for contributions to design automation in the areas of high-level synthesis, hardware descriptive languages, and design representation".^[8] She was the 2009 winner of the Sharon Keillor Award for Women in Engineering Education.^[9] She was named to the NCSU Electrical and Computer Engineering Hall of Fame in 2017.^[1]