Irina Gladkova was born in Tomsk, Russia. Tomsk, the administrative
center of the Tomsk region in Siberia, is located on the bank of the
river Tom, about 2,900 kilometers east of Moscow. Despite the common
belief that only bears and political convicts live there, Siberia
has a rich and varied culture, and Tomsk at that time was its
scientific and cultural hub.
Early in her childhood, Irina moved with her family to Donetsk
(Ukraine) where both of her parents got positions at the newly
established Science Center of the Academy of Sciences, consisting of
4 research Institutes and University.
Irina had a very happy
childhood in the Soviet Union, and like many other children in that
country, she got a rigorous education in mathematics and the sciences.
She was growing up in a mathematical family, and at the age of two she
attended her first conference. She did not give a presentation, but
her participation did not go unnoticed. Her career choice was more or
less predetermined by her circle of friends and family, and she graduated
from Donetsk State University with a mathematics major in 1989. She
then went to graduate school at the Institute of Applied Mathematics
and Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences, from which she graduated in
1993.
By that time the Soviet Union had fallen apart. One of the first
immediate consequences of that event was the reduction of funding
for basic research, and Irina chose to come to New York. There she
pursued another graduate degree in mathematics at the CUNY
Graduate Center, and obtained a Ph.D. in the area of signal
processing/waveform design. Her thesis advisor was Louis Auslander,
who passed away in February of 1997, a year before her defense.
She completed her Ph.D. degree in February of 1998, and began her career
at the Mathematics Department of Brooklyn College.
In the Fall of 1998, she moved to the Computer Science Department of
the City College of New York, where she is now an Associate Professor.
She works extensively with engineers and scientists on a
variety of applied problems in the area of signal processing. She
enjoys the collaborative process and the bringing of a project to
fruition. Her main present interests are radar waveform design,
satellite data analysis/compression and numerical methods.
