Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research Interests:

• Computer vision
• Machine learning
• Image processing
• Biometrics
• Medical image analysis

Vishal Patel is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, the director of the Vision and Image Understanding Lab, and an affiliate member of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. His research interests focus on biomedical image analysis, biometrics, computer vision, machine learning, and signal and image processing.

Patel serves on the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society (SPS) and as the vice president of conferences for the IEEE Biometrics Council. He is additionally an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

He has received a number of awards, including a 2021 IEEE SPS Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award; a 2021 NSF CAREER Award; a 2021 International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Young Biometrics Investigator award; Best Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in 2021, the IEEE Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Survelliance in 2019 and 2017, the IAPR International Conference on Biometrics in 2018, and the IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems in 2015; two Best Student Paper Awards at the 2018 International Conference on Pattern Recognition; a 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award; and a 2016 Jimmy H. C. Lin Invention Award from the University of Maryland (UMD) A. James Clark School of Engineering. He was also named an IAPR Fellow in 2024.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Patel was an A. Walter Tyson Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University and a research faculty member at the UMD Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He completed his PhD in electrical engineering at UMD in 2010.