Wang is the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute, where she leads research in big data analytics, data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, and databases. She has filed seven patents and has published one monograph and more than 170 research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Wang is also a member of UCLA’s Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Graduate Program.
“Wei is doing cutting-edge work at the crossroads of big data and biology and she is very deserving of this honor as the inaugural Kleinrock chair,” said Jayathi Murthy, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of UCLA Engineering. “We’re looking forward to seeing even more breakthroughs from her group.”
Among Wang’s numerous awards and honors are the IBM Invention Achievement Award in 2000 and 2001; the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship in 2005; the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) Outstanding Service Award in 2012; the Okawa Foundation Research Award in 2013; and the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) Service Award in 2016.
Wang received her Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA. Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2012, Wang was a faculty member of the Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The chair was established in honor of UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock, one of pioneers of computer networking and the early internet. The first connection on the ARPANET, the internet’s predecessor, was made in October 1969 from his lab in Boelter Hall to Stanford Research Institute. Many of his former students were major contributors to the endowment. A recipient of the National Medal of Science, Kleinrock is still active on campus, including mentoring UCLA undergraduates who are part of the new Internet Research Incubator at UCLA.
Image: Wei Wang
Photo credit: Joanne Leung