Dr. Maïté Brandt-Pearce is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at the University of Virginia. She joined UVA after receiving her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in 1993. Her research interests include nonlinear effects in fiber-optics, free-space optical communications, cross-layer design of optical networks subject to physical layer degradations, body area networks, and radar signal processing. Dr. Brandt-Pearce is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and an NSF RIA. She is a co-recipient of Best Paper Awards at ICC 2006 and GLOBECOM 2012. She had served on the editorial board of IEEE Transaction of Communications, IEEE Communications Letters, IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networks and Springer Photonic Network Communications. She was Jubilee Professor at Chalmers University, Sweden, in 2014. After serving as General Chair of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems & Computers in 2009, she was selected as Technical Vice-Chair of GLOBECOM 2016. She is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and a Senior Member of the IEEE. In addition to co-editing a book entitled Cross-Layer Design in Optical Networks, Springer Optical Networks Series, 2013, Prof. Brandt-Pearce has over one hundred and eighty technical publications.