Alyssa B. Apsel of Cornell University has been named the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Apsel, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since July 1, will hold the chair for five years. It is named for the playwright, journalist, U.S. ambassador to Italy and the first woman elected to Congress from Connecticut. Luce, who died in 1987, established the chair through a bequest, administered by The Henry Luce Foundation, "to encourage women to enter, study, graduate, and teach" in the sciences (including mathematics) and engineering. Henry Luce was the founder of Time , Life and Fortune magazines.

Apsel is an expert on high-speed, silicon-on-sapphire CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuits for optoelectronics. Her research focuses on merging these circuits with micro-optics to build high-performance electronics. Interconnect problems currently are a bottleneck in the advancement of high-speed and high-performance CMOS microelectronics. She approaches this problem by using optical interfaces to connect electronic subsystems. This fusion of optics and electronics on a sapphire substrate avoids difficulties of conventional high-speed electronic interfaces. This work includes the design of electronic interface circuitry and the hybridization of electronic and optical elements.

She recently completed her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. She earned her B.S. degree in engineering at Swarthmore College in 1995 and her M.S. in electrical and computer engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 1996.