PHILLIP DE LEON
University Executive Leader • Chief Research Officer • Professor of Electrical Engineering
Associate Vice Chancellor for Research
CU Denver

Phillip De Leon

Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Chief Research Officer at the University of Colorado Denver, and a Professor in Electrical Engineering. Phillip leads university's research administration, development, and strategy.

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Prior to retiring from New Mexico State University in 2022, Phillip De Leon held the Paul W. and Valerie Klipsch Distinguished Professorship in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and served as the Associate Vice President for Research and Chief Science Officer. While at NMSU he served as Associate Dean of Research in the College of Engineering (2016-2019) where he oversaw historic growth in research expenditures and research grant awards.

Phillip De Leon was the recipient of the Paul W. and Valerie Klipsch Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2015 – 2022), John and Tome Nakayama Professorship in Engineering for Teaching Excellence (2012 – 2015), Foreman Faculty Excellence Award (2014), Bromilow Award for Research (2010), and a Fulbright Faculty Scholar Award from the United States Department of State (2008). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Pi Mu Epsilon honor societies and a Senior Member of the IEEE.

He has been a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland (2002, 2022); Multimedia Communications Department at EURECOM Campus SophiaTech, France (2016); and Signal and Image Processing Department at Paris Institute of Technology ( Telecom ParisTech ) (2016). He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering, Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien), Austria (2008) and a faculty fellow at Sandia National Laboratories (2016-2023).

Teaching
Undergraduate and Graduate Courses
Research
Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
  • Acoustic echo cancellation
  • AI / machine learning applications
  • Embedded DSP systems
  • Satellite / wireless communications
  • Speaker recognition, Spoofing detection
  • Time-Frequency Analysis
Selected
Recent highlights
  • Leadership in research strategy and growth at CU Denver
  • Collaborations with national labs and industry partners
  • Ongoing work at the intersection of signal processing and machine learning

Recent papers

Representative work; see Publications for a full list.

  • S. Faziludeen, A. Sankar, P. L. De Leon, and U. Roedig, “LINGUARD: Authenticating Speech Recordings using Speech Recognition and Watermark,” Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoustics, Speech & Signal Proc. (ICASSP), May 2026. DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP55912.2026.11462384
    [ Paper | IEEE Xplore ]
  • S. Sandoval and P. L. De Leon, “Unifying Common Signal Analyses with Time-Frequency Atoms,” in review IEEE Trans. Sig. Process., Jan. 2026.
    [ arXiv Preprint | Paper | IEEE Xplore ]
  • S. Faziludeen, A. Sankar, P. L. De Leon, and U. Roedig , “Limitations of Watermarking AI-Generated Speech using AudioSeal,” Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Trust, Privacy, and Security in Intell. Syst., and Applications (TPS-ISA), Nov. 2025. DOI: 10.1109/TPS-ISA67132.2025.00029
    [ Paper | IEEE Xplore ]

Academic and leadership experience

Roles across research administration, department leadership, and faculty governance.

Education

University of Texas at Austin • University of Colorado Boulder

B.S. Electrical Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
M.S. Electrical Engineering
University of Colorado Boulder
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering
University of Colorado Boulder