Vladimir Goncharoff

Lecturer, ECE Department University of Illinois at Chicago

Vladimir Goncharoff’s life story is like that of many Americans: his parents emigrated to the US (from Ukraine) and worked hard to make life better for their children. As a result of much hard work and a good measure of luck, Vladimir has realized a dream of his youth: to complete PhD studies. He now works as Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Vladimir Goncharoff

Vladimir was an electronics hobbyist from a young age as a result of encouragement from his father, who worked as an electrical engineer at Motorola. That is why, while a student at William Rainey Harper College, Vladimir enrolled in several electronic technology courses. Then, after finishing Harper in 1976 and transferring to UIC, Vladimir majored in electrical engineering and learned the theoretical foundation for many of the topics that he already studied at Harper. This theory was complemented by hands-on experience that Vladimir acquired by working at Motorola as an engineering co-op student during his senior year at UIC.

As UIC graduation day was approaching, Vladimir began to interview for engineering jobs and apply for graduate study at several Chicago-area universities. He was offered a full-paid scholarship to Northwestern University in Evanston, so he decided to extend university studies “just one more year” before seeking employment. One thing led to another, and four years later Vladimir completed a PhD at Northwestern.

Not having given much thought about life after graduate school, one day Vladimir heard that UIC was hiring new faculty. He immediately applied, and one week later was hired as Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

At UIC Vladimir discovered that his favorite part of the job was teaching and interacting with students. Through a series of fortunate events he became a lecturer in the department, where to this day he teaches both undergraduate and graduate students. Over the past 36 years Vladimir Goncharoff has taught thousands of university students, received numerous awards for excellent teaching, taken part in training high school teachers for the Project Lead-The-Way Program, worked as speech signal processing consultant to industry and government, and co-authored a textbook on signal processing.

Vladimir advises his students to always be curious, to study in groups, to study until concepts become clear, to be proactive in finding opportunities for personal development or employment, and to have a positive outlook on life.

Hobbies: electronics, music, chess, saber fencing, learning about different culture

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