New Faculty Join UCLA Engineering

Oct 2, 2012

By UCLA Samueli Newsroom

The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has recently added two new faculty members: Wentai Liu, professor of bioengineering, who joined in Winter 2012; and Wei Wang, professor of computer science. See below to find out more about them.

Wentai Liu
Professor of Bioengineering
Ph.D. – University of Michigan

Wentai Liu studies the neural implants dealing with nerves and muscles for retina, epilepsy, muscle, eyelids, spinal cord, and bladder. Since its inception, he has been leading the engineering efforts of the retinal prosthesis to restore vision, finally leading to successful implant trials in blind patients.

Liu has received several notable honors for his research including a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2010, an R&D 100 Award in 2009; the Alcoa Foundation’s Distinguished Engineering Research Award, a NASA Group Achievement Award, and several outstanding  paper awards from IEEE. Liu has also received an Outstanding Alumni Award from National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan, where he received his bachelor’s degree

Prior to joining UCLA Engineering in Winter 2012, Liu was a professor at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to that, Liu was a professor at North Carolina State University.

Wei Wang
Professor of Computer Science
Ph.D. – UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science

Wei Wang’s research interests are in data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, and databases. She has filed seven patents, and has published one monograph and more than 100 research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

Prior to joining UCLA Engineering, Wang had spent 10 years as a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was also a member of the Carolina Center for Genomic Sciences and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Wang was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center before joining UNC.

Wang’s honors include the NSF CAREER Award, IBM Invention Achievement Award (twice), and was a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow. She is currently an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data, International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics, and the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics.

 

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