Santiago Segarra, W. M. Rice Trustee Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, has won a 2025 Early Career Award from the European Association For Signal Processing (EURASIP).
The EURASIP Early Career Award honors researchers whose work has led to significant scientific achievements and shows a high potential to advance scientific knowledge through timely innovations. This award recognizes Segarra’s "contributions to graph signal processing and graph-based machine learning."
Segarra’s research focuses on increasing the utility of artificial intelligence by studying the structural properties of real-world data. "Graph-structured data is everywhere—governing congestion dynamics in traffic networks, encoding cortical activity in brain networks, and shaping product adoption in social networks,” said Segarra.
His approach improves upon conventional methodologies. “Traditional neural networks struggle to capture the intrinsic structure of such data,” said Segarra. “Over the past decade, my research has focused on developing signal processing and machine learning methodologies explicitly designed to learn from these complex networks. Our approaches have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse domains, from optimizing wireless communication networks to advancing metagenomic analysis."
Segarra earned his Ph.D. in electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and served as a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. He joined the Rice Engineering and Computing faculty in 2018.
He will be formally presented with the award at the 33rd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) in Palermo, Italy, Sept. 8-12, 2025.