James E. Fowler received the B.S. degree in computer and information science engineering and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA, in 1990, 1992, and 1996, respectively.
He was a program director in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) directorate of the U.S. National Science Foundation
(NSF) from 2022 to 2025. He is currently the head of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University where he holds the James W. Bagley Chair.
In 2017, Dr. Fowler was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to lossy source coding and dimensionality reduction of multidimensional data. Additionally, his research activities led to his being named Mississippi State University's winner of the Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award for 2018. Additionally, in 2014, he was awarded both the Faculty Research and Career Achievement awards for the Bagley College of Engineering.
Dr. Fowler was previously the Chair of both the Computational Imaging Technical Committee and the Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was a General co-Chair of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Paris, France, and is currently a General Chair of the Data Compression Conference. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2017 to 2019. He was also previously a Senior Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Signal Processing Letters.