Rate My Professor Lori Mann Bruce

Lori Mann Bruce, Ph.D., served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tennessee Technological University from 2018 to 2025. In this role, she oversaw academic operations for over 10,000 students across eight colleges, directed research and strategic planning, and achieved a perfect academic program quality score from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, the first in over four decades. Under her leadership, Tennessee Tech launched new bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. programs aligned with workforce needs, tripled annual research funding from $16 million to over $46 million, and invested $350 million in campus infrastructure, including new science and engineering facilities and renovations. She established the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence and implemented a campus-wide compensation study resulting in faculty and staff pay increases. Prior to Tennessee Tech, Bruce was Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at Mississippi State University, where she also served as Giles Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Bagley College of Engineering, Executive Director of the High Performance Computing Collaboratory, and Interim Director of the Raspet Flight Research Laboratory. Earlier, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 1996 to 2000.

Bruce earned her B.S.E. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1991 and 1996, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992, and a certificate in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Tech/Emory joint program. Her research focuses on hyperspectral image analysis, signal processing, remote sensing, automated target recognition, wavelet transforms, data fusion, and unmanned aerial systems for precision agriculture. She has led federally and industry-funded research projects totaling over $20 million and authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications cited more than 6,000 times. Notable publications include "An Adaptive Support Vector Machine Classifier for Hyperspectral Image Analysis" (IEEE TGRS, 2014), "Locality Preserving Genetic Algorithms for Spatial-Spectral Hyperspectral Image Classification" (IEEE JSTARS, 2013), "Information Fusion in a Redundant-Wavelet-Transform Domain for Noise-Robust Hyperspectral Classification" (IEEE TGRS, 2012), "Decision Level Fusion of Spectral Reflectance and Derivative Information for Hyperspectral Classification and Target Recognition" (IEEE TGRS, 2010), and "Wavelet-Based Feature Extraction for Improved Endmember Abundance Estimation in Linear Unmixing of Hyperspectral Signals" (IEEE TGRS, 2004). She presented an online seminar on hyperspectral remote sensing reaching over 4,700 students worldwide. Honors include IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2016-present), William L. Giles Distinguished Professor (2012-present), Bagley College of Engineering Researcher of the Year (2007), and NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (1992-1995).