Karen Rudie ’80

With any luck, none of us will benefit from the fruits of her labour, but Karen Rudie ’80 is working hard on developing policy recommendations for the most efficient way for government and emergency response workers to respond to a natural disaster or a medical outbreak. Equipped with a PhD in electrical engineering, Karen is a professor in the Queen’s University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, working mainly in the area of control of discrete-event systems. According to her biography, this is the study of “processes whose behaviour is described by sequences of events or actions and which require control to make them behave in some desirable way.” This idea can be better understood if we describe one of her current projects, which focuses on using mathematics to develop more proficient ways to determine in what order which actions emergency responders ought to take in the event of a major disaster. For those more engineering oriented, decentralized control of discrete-event systems may also be defined as “those cases where multiple agents act on the system and yet each agent has only a partial view and partial control of the events that occur within the system. In such systems, the development of solutions is complicated by issues of coordination and potential lack of communication between agents.”

Karen’s accomplishments both as an electrical engineer and as a professor are tremendous. She has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and academic awards, has published many academic papers (just Google her!), and has had conferred on her several prestigious teaching awards, including two Queen's Golden Apple Awards in Applied Science and a Professor of the Year Award for fourth-year teaching in the ECE Department. She has appeared for five years in the Maclean's Guide to Canadian Universities in their list of "Popular Profs" at Queen's University.

“Bialik inspired me to become a professor,” Karen told me by phone when reminiscing about her high school days. “It was very intellectually challenging, and in some ways, the teachers taught better than my own professors after Bialik.” Some of those teachers whom she made a point of mentioning include Elaine Wisenthal, Brian Jackson, Shaila Bordo, and Jerry Cohen. She also fondly remembers the late Barry Kirsch as the director of the school play. Moreover, Karen credits Bialik for giving her the confidence to “empower” herself to delve into what is traditionally thought of as a male-dominated career.

As a lover of English literature and writing, Karen could not have predicted that she would one day have the esteemed career in electrical engineering that she currently does, for she explained to me that she “switched into engineering (in university) not exactly knowing what to expect.” Karen knew that she loved math and science and wanted one day to be a university professor, but as for “using mathematical logic models of knowledge to help guide agent decision-making in distributed systems problems” (again, from her biography), she could not have predicted that for herself. To that end, Karen advises that students ought to “follow what grabs them,” as she herself did.

For more information on Karen’s research, click here: http://www.ece.queensu.ca/directory/faculty/Rudie.html

The photo above is of Karen and her son, Ethan.

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