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The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) recently elected George Mason University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professor Kathleen Wage as Fellow, a prestigious honor. Professor Wage’s citation recognizes her “for contributions to array signal processing performance, long-range acoustic propagation, and acoustics education.” She will receive her fellowship certificate during the plenary session at a meeting in New Orleans this spring. Fellow status is granted to members who have made notable contributions to the field of acoustics.
Wage said, “I am incredibly honored to become an ASA Fellow, and am extraordinarily grateful to the society that has inspired and enriched my career.”
Wage’s research blends signal processing and underwater acoustics. She said, “There are all kinds of acoustics: jet noise, music, speech, and underwater acoustics. In ASA you get this multi-disciplinary fertilization of ideas–people have so many pathways into it.”
She became interested in the field when a grad school advisor suggested she take a research trip sailing the waters of Cape Cod as an introduction to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program. “I was interested in signal processing, but I didn’t do any acoustics previously. My advisor said, ‘Well, you’ll go on this ten-day sailing trip,’ and I said, ‘Sign me up!’”
During her career Wage has spent over 100 days on research ships to deploy and recover equipment for deep water experiments. Her current projects focus on a class of universal algorithms for detecting and localizing sources. These new algorithms automatically adapt to changes in the ocean environment, require minimal data to train, and are robust to sensor perturbations. She and her students are testing their algorithms on data from experiments in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans and the Philippine Sea.
Wage joined ASA as a graduate student and has been an active member since. She served on the Acoustical Oceanography, Underwater Acoustics, and Signal Processing Technical Committees for the society and in May 2024 she was one of eight prominent acousticians who served as instructors for the ASA School, a two-day course for graduate students and early career scientists. She received the Rossing Prize in Acoustics Education in 2022.
Wage notes that the breadth of acoustics is one reason why she enjoys introducing students to the ASA Conference. This year she is taking a group of ECE students to New Orleans to present results of their senior design project, for which they built a low-cost underwater acoustic array testbed and used it to send and receive communication signals in George Mason’s competition pool and the Occoquan River.