Electrical Engineering Professor receives Sloan Research Fellowship

Feb 22, 2012

By UCLA Samueli Newsroom

By Matthew Chin

Jin Hyung Lee, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science; with joint appointments in psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences; and radiology has received a 2012 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is one of 126 scientists and scholars from 51 universities in the U.S. and Canada to receive the prestigious fellowship. Lee was among six UCLA faculty members who received the honor.

Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders, according to the New York-based foundation.

Lee’s research interests are to analyze, debug, and engineer the brain circuit. Specifically, her goals are to understand the brain’s connectivity and its function at the systems level and develop ways to fix the brain for various diseases. This includes working on a wide range of topics including biomedical imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and optical imaging; signal processing algorithms; computational algorithms; optics; genetics; and molecular biology.

“Jin’s basic research to develop new tools to understand the brain lies at that nexus of several areas and it holds great promise in the advancement of medicine,” said Vijay K. Dhir, dean of UCLA Engineering. “Jin is very deserving of this recognition from the Sloan Foundation. We are extremely proud she is a member of our faculty.”

Administered and funded by the Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are awarded in close cooperation with the scientific community. To qualify, candidates must first be nominated by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Fellows receive $50,000 to be used to further their research.

Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of exceptional young scientists and scholars in chemistry; computer science; economics; mathematics; computational and evolutionary molecular biology; neuroscience; ocean sciences; and physics.

The five other UCLA faculty members who received a Sloan Research Fellowship are: Leah Platt Boustan, economics; Neil K. Garg, chemistry; John Novembre, molecular biology; Sebastien Roch, mathematics; and Marcus Roper, mathematics.

For information about the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, please go to: www.sloan.org.

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