NMSU Faculty Focus: Laura Boucheron

Associate Professor Laura Boucheron provides a unique perspective to Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering students. She knows what it is like to walk in their shoes. Boucheron, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at NMSU, took courses with some of the same professors that her current students have.

After earning her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008, Boucheron returned to NMSU as a postdoctoral researcher in 2008-09. Following two years as a member of the research faculty in 2009-11, she became a tenure-track faculty member in fall 2011.

“I love teaching undergraduates. I enjoy teaching students about the foundations of my field, signal and image processing, and demonstrating to them the power of signal processing in so many applications,” Boucheron said. “I am very passionate about encouraging undergraduates to pursue graduate degrees. All of my current graduate students were undergraduates I had in class a few years ago.”

Boucheron works with academic analytics trying to find ways to improve curricula and student performance. She’s also involved in interdisciplinary topics such as agriculture and astronomy.

Some of Boucheron’s current projects include segmentation of solar images for space weather models, detection of green chile in images for automated robotic harvesting, automated computation of body condition score for precision ranching, analysis of student schedules for degree progression and topic-level analysis of the electrical engineering bachelor’s degree.