Dr. Niki Pissinou, a professor and the Director of the FIU Telecommunications and Information Technology Institute, has been a champion of mentoring women and underrepresented groups in STEM throughout her active professional career. She has published over two hundred and fifty research papers in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters on her specialty areas of computer networking, telecommunications, distributed systems, mobile computing, security, and aspects of nontraditional data management. She has also co-edited over four texts in the areas of mobile and wireless networking and systems and over fourteen IEEE and ACM conference volumes. Widely cited in books and research papers, her research 

has been funded by NSF, DHS, NASA, DOT, DoD, state governments, and industry. She has graduated over nineteen Ph.D. students who now hold positions in academia, federal government, and industry, and has mentored countless other graduate and undergraduate students, as well as faculty.