Aydogan Ozcan elected to the National Academy of Inventors
Aydogan Ozcan, Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Bioengineering, has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
The organization announced this year’s class of 148 fellows on December 11. The prestigious honor is given to academic inventors who have, “demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.”
Ozcan has made pioneering and high-impact inventions in mobile health, telemedicine, microscopy, sensing, and diagnostics technologies. Collectively, these technologies have the potential to dramatically increase the reach of cost-effective diagnostics and medical technologies to resource-limited settings and developing countries. And in general, they are helping to democratize biomedical measurement science. He has founded two companies to commercialize these inventions, leading to products currently in use.
Ozcan is the associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Surgery at the Geffen School of Medicine. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.
He has received numerous national and international honors recognizing his leadership in developing new technologies to improve global health, imaging and diagnostics, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the International Commission for Optics Prize, the inaugural SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, and the inaugural Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science, from Turkey’s Koç Foundation. Last month, he was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Also elected this year as a fellow of the academy was UCLA Samueli alumnus Dean Ho ’01 (Physiological Sciences), MS ’03, PhD ’05. Ho, who received the school’s distinguished young alumnus award in 2008, joined the faculty of the National University of Singapore earlier this year. He was previously a UCLA professor of dentistry and bioengineering.
New fellows will be formally inducted into the academy in April, at the organization’s annual conference in Houston.