College mourns sudden passing of Electrical Engineering's Nirmal Bose

Nirmal K. Bose, HRB-systems professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, died on Sunday, Nov. 22. Bose, 69, died of a heart attack during a visit to the University of Wuppertal in Germany while he was on sabbatical.

"It is with deep sorrow that we learned that while on a trip to Germany, Dr. Nirmal Bose suffered a fatal heart attack. Dr. Bose was a world-renowned expert in the field of multidimensional signals and systems who brought great international visibility and prestige to our department," said Kenneth Jenkins, head of the electrical engineering department. "His passing is a great loss to Penn State and the electrical engineering profession that he served with dedication and distinction for many decades. I ask everyone to join me in sending our sincere condolences to his family, students and friends."

A member of the Penn State faculty since 1986, Bose received his bachelor of technology in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India, his master's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and his doctorate in electrical engineering from Syracuse University.

Prior to coming to Penn State in 1986, Bose served on the faculties of Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh.

According to his Web site, Bose pioneered the development of multidimensional systems theory and applied it to the processing and coding of degraded signals. Specifically, he investigated the restoration and high resolution reconstruction of blurred and noisy images and suggested a computationally efficient scheme for tracking multiple targets in clutter.

Bose's research interests also included robust systems, combinatorics and graph theory, artificial neural networks and neurofuzzy computing.

His research received funding from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, NASA, IBM, Army Research Office, Air Force Research Laboratory and Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse.

Bose was a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and held memberships in the American Society of Engineering Education and the Sigma Xi scientific research society. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal on Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing and an associate editor of IEEE's Transactions on Circuits and Systems.

Bose's awards include the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Education Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Merit Award, the Alexander Von Humboldt Research Award and the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society's Outstanding Research Award.

He is survived by his wife, Chandra Bose, and two daughters, Meenekshi and Enakshi Bose.

A memorial service is planned for 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 6, at Worship Hall in the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center on the University Park campus. Details are available here as well as on the College of Engineering's homepage at http://www.engr.psu.edu/, on the college's Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/psuengineering and on Twitter at twitter.com/psuengineering.