UCLA Data Mining Scholar Wei Wang Elected IEEE Fellow

Wei Wang, a professor of computer science and the holder of the Leonard Kleinrock Term Chair at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been selected as a fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for her contributions to data mining.

The distinction is conferred annually by the IEEE Board of Directors to individuals with extraordinary accomplishments in the advancement of science, technology and engineering. 

Wang is the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute, which focuses on artificial intelligence and data science. In addition to data mining, her research interests include machine learning, computational biology and bioinformatics. She holds a joint faculty appointment in the Computational Medicine Department, which is affiliated with both the David Geffen School of Medicine and UCLA Samueli. She is also a member of the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biology, the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Graduate Program.

A graduate of UCLA where she received a Ph.D. in computer science, Wang is leading a team of researchers from UCLA and UC Irvine to develop a comprehensive, early-warning system to predict the emergence and spread of future pandemics. A fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, she serves as the chair of the executive committee for the association’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. She is also a member of a major chemistry research center, headquartered at Notre Dame University, which aims to harness machine learning to help solve problems in health care, materials science and energy research. 

Wang has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and an Okawa Foundation Research Award.