Rate My Professor Brad Whitaker

Dr. Brad Whitaker serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Montana State University, where he has been on the faculty since 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Whitaker's research specializes in applied machine learning, with key interests in classification, feature extraction, sparse coding, signal processing, and their applications across diverse domains including biomedical signal analysis, power distribution systems, hyperspectral imaging, healthcare analytics, and environmental monitoring. His work addresses challenges such as heart sound classification for disease detection, atrial fibrillation identification from ECG recordings, state estimation and false data injection attack detection in power grids, automated poultry disease detection via audio spectrograms, and predicting hospital length of stay using machine learning.

Whitaker's scholarly contributions include highly cited publications such as 'Combining sparse coding and time-domain features for heart sound classification' (Physiological Measurement, 2017), 'AF detection from ECG recordings using feature selection, sparse coding, and ensemble learning' (Physiological Measurement, 2018), 'An overview of supervised machine learning approaches for applications in active distribution networks' (Energies, 2023), 'Distribution system state estimation and false data injection attack detection with a multi-output deep neural network' (Energies, 2023), and 'Sparse decomposition of audio spectrograms for automated disease detection in chickens' (IEEE GlobalSIP, 2014). These efforts have amassed over 579 citations on Google Scholar. He has earned prestigious teaching honors, including the Phi Kappa Phi Anna K. Fridley Distinguished Teaching Award from the MSU Office of the Provost (2022), the department's Outstanding Instructor award for 2018-2019, and an Early Career Success Certificate (2019). Whitaker holds leadership roles as ECE Search Chair and a member of the Center for Science, Technology, Ethics and Society leadership team. He advises the MSU robosub team, which placed 12th internationally in 2022, and leads REU projects on wildfire threats and agricultural autonomy. His involvement spans major grants, such as a $4.47 million cybersecurity project and initiatives securing electric vehicle infrastructure.