2 UCLA Samueli Professors Elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Two faculty members from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering — Aydogan Ozcan and Lixia Zhang — have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional honors granted to American engineers.

Ozcan and Zhang are among 128 members and 22 international members elected today in recognition of their outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice and education.

Aydogan Ozcan

Ozcan, who holds the Volgenau Chair in Engineering Innovation, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering. He was elected to the academy for his “contributions to mobile sensing and telepathology for medical diagnostics.”

A pioneer of computational optics, Ozcan has developed new technologies with broad applications in biomedicine and health care that have helped increase access to advanced measurements in resource-limited areas. He has created high-resolution imaging and sensing techniques for use in mobile phones and other lower-cost portable devices, eliminating the need for bulky and expensive equipment, and has developed a series of innovative microscopy techniques that use algorithms rather than traditional optical lenses for high-volume, high-resolution rapid imaging for biomedical sensing and diagnostics. In recent years, he has incorporated artificial intelligence into his work in advanced optics and microscopy tools.

Among his many awards and recognitions, Ozcan received the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize for optical engineering in 2022 from the professional society Optica and the 2023 Dennis Gabor Award from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Inventors, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, SPIE and Optica.

At UCLA, Ozcan is also the associate director for entrepreneurship, industry and academic exchange at the California NanoSystems Institute and is a professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which has supported his research lab’s scientific mentorship of undergraduate students.

Ozcan holds more than 85 patents and has co-founded three startup companies based on technologies spun out of his research lab. For the past five years, he has been recognized as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers by the international data and analytics firm Clarivate.

Ozcan joined UCLA’s faculty as an assistant professor in 2007 following a research faculty position at Harvard Medical School and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, where he earned his doctorate.

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Lixia Zhang

Zhang, a distinguished professor of computer science who holds the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networks, has been an influential researcher for more than three decades in the architecture, performance and security of the internet and its connected devices. She was elected to the academy for her “development of internet protocols which significantly impacted internet quality and performance, and for leadership in setting standards.”

Among Zhang’s most notable achievements is the design of the Resource Reservation Protocol, or RSVP, a robust network signaling protocol used to manage network resources that has sustained internet growth for over two decades. Zhang also coined the term “middlebox” to describe newer network devices such as firewalls and network address translators, which represent departures from the original internet protocol architecture.

In 2010, Zhang was named the lead principal investigator of the Named Data Networking project, a multi-institutional initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to fundamentally rethink and redesign the internet for enhanced quality and security. The idea is to shift from the internet’s current host-based, point-to-point architecture toward a data-centric networking model. This design choice decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling security to be built into the network architecture.

In addition to her scholarly work, Zhang was also an early contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force, a global body that lays out the technical standards of the internet through the consensus of its participants.

Zhang has received several major international honors for her work, including the 2009 Internet Award from the IEEE and the 2020 SIGCOMM Award for lifetime contributions to the field of communication networks, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications. She is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame and an elected fellow of the ACM and IEEE.

Prior to joining UCLA’s faculty in 1995, Zhang worked at the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center. She earned a master’s degree at California State University, Los Angeles, and a doctorate at MIT.

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4 UCLA alumni elected

Other newly elected academy members include UCLA alumni Judith Estrin (mathematics and computer science), CEO at JLabs in Menlo Park, California; Justin Hanes (chemical engineering), the Lewis J. Ort Professor at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University; Leslie Momoda (materials science and engineering), executive vice president at HRL Laboratories in Malibu and chair of the dean’s corporate advisory board at UCLA Samueli; and Mary Roybal (mechanical engineering), senior principal engineering fellow (retired) at Raytheon in Tucson.

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Founded in 1964, the nonprofit National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The academy has more than 2,800 peer-elected members and international members, including senior professionals in business, academia and government who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers. The academy provides expert advice to the nation on matters involving engineering and technology.