Past AMI Director

Board Member

Associate Chair, External Relations, Department of Electrical, Computing, and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

Melinda Piket-May gained leadership skills, developed a new sense of confidence, and made many new friends participating in AMI 2009-10.  She became director of AMI in 2012-2014 and aimed to provide high impact learning experiences to professional women in all realms of higher education balanced with time to develop personal connections with other Colorado/Wyoming higher education professionals.

In 1993, she began teaching at CU Boulder, where she later served as Interim Associate Vice-Chancellor of Research.   She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Lancaster (England), a master’s degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a doctoral degree from Northwestern University, all in electrical engineering. Her research focuses on high-speed digital engineering and engineering education. Prior to CU Bounder, she worked at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Silicon Graphics, and Cray Research.  She is an active participant in engineering and educational conferences.

Piket-May served two terms on the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) Committee on Radio Frequency (CORF) and was a technical ambassador to Chili at the ALMA radio astronomy observatory site in the Chilean Andes. She is drawn to faculty governance, having served as Chair of the CU System Faculty Council and Chair of the Boulder Faculty Assembly. She also has served at the state level on the Colorado Faculty Advisory Committee to the Colorado Department of Higher Education and Faculty Advisor to the Colorado Commission on Higher Education.

Melinda enjoys STEM outreach, genealogy and 4WDing (especially in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado) as well as spending time with her husband, Tim, rescue dog, Chewy, and daughter Kaitlin, who lives in Sweden.