MSU Bagley College of Engineering names Fowler as electrical and computer engineering department head
January 1, 2026
(photo by Russ Houston / © Mississippi State University)
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State’s James Fowler has been named head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“After nearly four years at the National Science Foundation, I am delighted to be returning to MSU and am thrilled to have the opportunity to once again work with the faculty, staff, and students to advance the ECE department.” A faculty member in the department since 1997, Fowler is a William L. Giles Distinguished Professor and holds the Billie J. Ball Endowed Professorship in Engineering. He served as the department’s graduate program director from 2008-2019 and as interim department head from 2019-2020. He also served as associate director of MSU’s Distributed Analytics and Security Institute from 2014-2017.
In 2022, Fowler was named program director of the National Science Foundation’s Communication and Information Foundations (CIF) program within the foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIS).
“Dr. Fowler’s distinguished record of scholarship and service at MSU, combined with his leadership in professional organizations and the NSF, made him an outstanding choice for ECE Department Head,” said Dave Ford, Dean of the Bagley College of Engineering. “I am excited that Dr. Fowler will soon return to us from NSF, and I look forward to working with him to move the department forward according to the vision he shared in the interview process.”
In 2018, Fowler received the Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award for his outstanding record in research and scholarship. He has published 63 peer-reviewed journal articles in his career, including articles in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, and IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.
Fowler is a fellow of the IEEE, previously serving in multiple editorial roles for the institute’s journals, including editor-in-chief of IEEE Signal Processing Letters and senior area editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
Fowler received his doctoral and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and a bachelor’s in computer and information science engineering from The Ohio State University.