Two faculty members from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, Aydogan Ozcan and Lixia Zhang, have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. This honor is among the highest professional recognitions for American engineers.
Ozcan and Zhang are part of a group of 128 members and 22 international members elected in recognition of their significant contributions to engineering research, practice, and education.
Aydogan Ozcan holds the Volgenau Chair in Engineering Innovation at UCLA. He was recognized for his “contributions to mobile sensing and telepathology for medical diagnostics.” Ozcan has pioneered computational optics, developing technologies with applications in biomedicine and healthcare that increase access to advanced measurements in resource-limited areas. His work includes high-resolution imaging techniques using mobile phones and other portable devices, as well as innovative microscopy techniques that rely on algorithms instead of traditional lenses. Recently, he has integrated artificial intelligence into his optics and microscopy tools.
Ozcan’s accolades include the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize from Optica in 2022 and the Dennis Gabor Award from SPIE in 2023. He is an elected fellow of multiple prestigious organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Inventors, IEEE, Royal Society of Chemistry, APS, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, SPIE, and Optica.
At UCLA, Ozcan serves as associate director for entrepreneurship at the California NanoSystems Institute and is a professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He holds over 85 patents and has co-founded three startups based on his research lab’s technologies. For five consecutive years, Clarivate has named him one of the world’s most highly cited researchers.
Lixia Zhang holds the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networks at UCLA. She was honored for her “development of internet protocols which significantly impacted internet quality and performance,” as well as her leadership in setting standards. Her notable achievements include designing RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol), a network signaling protocol managing resources critical to internet growth over two decades. She also introduced “middlebox” to describe new network devices like firewalls.
In 2010, Zhang led the Named Data Networking project funded by NSF to redesign internet architecture towards a data-centric model enhancing security by decoupling trust in data from hosts.
Zhang contributed early on to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards development. Her honors include IEEE’s Internet Award (2009) and ACM SIGCOMM Award (2020). She is an Internet Hall of Fame member and an elected fellow of ACM and IEEE.
Before joining UCLA’s faculty in 1995, Zhang worked at XEROX Palo Alto Research Center after earning her master’s degree at California State University Los Angeles and doctorate at MIT.
Additionally, four UCLA alumni were elected: Judith Estrin (CEO at JLabs), Justin Hanes (Professor at Johns Hopkins University), Leslie Momoda (Executive VP at HRL Laboratories), Mary Roybal (retired Senior Principal Engineer Fellow at Raytheon).
The National Academy of Engineering was founded in 1964 as part of The National Academies providing expert advice on engineering matters nationwide with more than 2,800 peer-elected members globally including leaders across business academia government sectors contributing substantially worldwide.
