UCLA Electrical Engineering

10/20/2026

Professor Jason R. Petta made this years list of 2026 Top Cited Scholars on Scilit. This year, 10,367 established researchers are recognized as Top Cited Scholars (TCS), alongside 860 early‑career scholars (academic age ≤10 years) as Top Cited Young Scholars (TCYS). The selections are based on top cited papers published between 2016 and 2025, drawn from over 680,000 unique authors after rigorous data cleaning and ethics screening.

Please see the news release: https://www.scilit.com/about/media/news/18417

10/20/2026

Professors Sergio Carbajo and Asad Madni published a joint paper titled Discovery as Public Infrastructure: Renewing the Social Contract for Science in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper was published in collaboration with Professor Julia Powles of UCLAs School of Law.

Please see the paper: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/10/pgag312/8907485

10/16/2026

Congratulations to Professor Aydogan Ozcan for being named an inaugural winner of the University of California Regents Innovation Awards! Professor Ozcan was honored for his pioneering work that harnesses the physics of light to perform AI computations, paving the way for more sustainable, energy-efficient AI and expanding access to next-generation intelligence beyond traditional data centers.

Please see the news release for more details: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/23-uc-innovators-who-are-changing-world

09/27/2026

Congratulations to Assistant Professors Yang Zhang, Liz Izhikevich, and Xiaofan Cui for receiving 2026-2027 Stacey Nicholas Early Career Faculty Research Awards! The awards recognize outstanding junior faculty driving high-impact innovation across engineering disciplines and provide vital support to accelerate their groundbreaking research projects and academic contributions.

09/27/2026

Congratulations to Professor Lara Dolecek for receiving the 2026 Eon Instrumentation Inc. Excellence in Teaching Award! Since joining UCLA in 2009, Dolecek has taught thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, leading schoolwide efforts to introduce key courses in data science, machine learning, and robust data storage systems. Beyond her impactful instruction and research in information systems, she serves as director of the department’s Fast Track to Success Program for high-achieving undergraduates and actively mentors students through UCLA COSMOS and local K-12 STEM initiatives.

Please see the news release:

UCLA Samueli Announces 2026 Excellence in Teaching Awards Sep 11, 2026 UCLA Samueli Each year, the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering honors alumni, faculty, students and other engineering leaders for outstanding achievements in their fields. The following profiles highlight recipients of the Eon In...

09/27/2026

Distinguished Adjunct Professor Asad Madni has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada's Academy of Science. The honor recognizes Madni's pioneering contributions to the development and commercialization of sensing and systems technologies that revolutionized navigation and stability in aerospace and automotive systems, helping to save millions of lives worldwide and establishing the critical foundation for autonomous vehicles.

Madni was also celebrated for his scientific research at Toronto Metropolitan University and served as a doctoral thesis advisor to many prominent Canadian engineers. He will be formally inducted into the society's Class of 2026 on November 13 in Ottawa, Canada. Please see the news release.

In addition to his fellowship induction, Madni was elected to the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame (ESHF). He was selected by the Board of Trustees for "[his] work in the development and commercialization of the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) gyroscope for aerospace and automotive safety." The Engineering and Science Hall of Fame mission is to honor Engineers and Scientists whose work significantly enhances the quality of life for humanity. Commercialized as the GyroChip and first applied in the aerospace and defense industries, the technology has saved lives around the world through its use in aircraft and passenger vehicles. [His] many other accomplishments throughout [his] distinguished career are also recognized by the ESHF. It is a great honor that [he joins his] fellow inductees Wilbur and Orville Wright for controlled, powered flight; Glenn Curtiss for enhancements of aircraft; James Doolittle for night flight instruments, aviation fuel; Hans von Ohain for the jet engine; Elmond Decker for high frequency wave transmission; James Tsui for aircraft position and GPS software and many other of [his] fellow inductees".

More specific information about the ESHF and inductees may be found at Engineering & Science Hall of Fame (eshalloffame.orq).

09/27/2026

In collaboration with UC Davis, Ozcan Lab published a new paper on the development of a deep learning framework that reconstructs high-resolution fluorescence lifetime images from data acquired at up to five times lower spatial resolution, offering a path toward faster tissue imaging without complex hardware. Fluorescence lifetime imaging, or FLIM, lets researchers see biochemical detail in tissue without dyes or stains, by tracking how long molecules glow after being hit with a pulse of light. That glow duration carries information about metabolism and tissue health that standard microscopy cannot capture, which is why FLIM has attracted interest for applications such as cancer diagnostics and surgical guidance. This research built a deep learning system called FLIMPSR that reconstructs higher-resolution FLIM images from scans captured at much lower resolution. This system could help move high-resolution FLIM out of the research lab and into faster-paced clinical settings, including surgery rooms, where images need to be processed in real time.

09/27/2026

UCLA’s Quantum Innovation Hub (QIH) has welcomed Boeing as its first major industry partner to advance quantum networking research and practical communications technologies at the UCLA Research Park. Led by QIH Director Jason Petta, who emphasized Boeing's steadfast commitment to the initiative and expressed enthusiasm for expanding the collaboration at the UCLA Research Park, the partnership will focus on building experimental hardware and system design that can help move quantum communications from laboratory research toward practical applications. By bridging academia and industry under Petta's direction, the initiative will strengthen UCLA's position as a leader in quantum science and engineering.

Please see the news release:

Collaboration advances quantum networking research while expanding UCLA’s growing quantum innovation ecosystem…

09/27/2026

Professor Benjamin Williams’ group, in collaboration with Professor Mitchell Spearrin of UCLA MAE, has demonstrated that a new frequency-agile architecture for THz quantum-cascade lasers – the metasurface vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting-laser (VECSEL) – is well suited for terahertz (THz) gas-phase spectroscopy. The THz range is a spectral fingerprint range for many polar molecules, and often has stronger signatures than in the infrared or visible range. Laser absorption spectroscopy has been a workhorse technique in the IR/visible but has been little used in the THz due to lack of widely tunable sources. The metasurface VECSEL is coarsely tuned using a piezoelectric control over the 2.5-2.8 THz range to be close to the spectral features of interest, where it can then be finely swept over a range of 40-80 GHz to resolve multiple spectral features of gas-phase hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S). The relatively high power of the VECSEL source (~0.5 mW) allowed the use of room-temperature THz detectors, instead of cryogenic bolometers previously used in many THz laser absorption spectroscopy experiments.

Please see the article: https://pubs.acs.org/apchd5/article/13/15/4167/5231238/Broadband-Terahertz-Laser-Absorption-Spectroscopy

06/05/2026

The paper by Professor Cong and his former student Deming Chen (now the Abel Bliss professor at UIUC) entitled DAOmap: a depth-optimal area optimization mapping algorithm for FPGA designs was inducted into the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame on May 15, 2026 at the IEEE FCCM’2026 Conference. The paper was originally published in 2004 at the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD). This is the sixth paper co-authored by Cong that has been inducted into the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame.

Please see the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICCAD.2004.1382677