A team of UCLA scientists has been awarded a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for research aimed at reshaping and improving how images and large data sets are collected and analyzed in science, engineering, medicine and other fields.
"The Keck Foundation grants are very competitive, and we are honored to be selected," said Joseph Rudnick, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences and senior dean of the College of Letters and Science. "An outstanding team of UCLA scientists has put together three of UCLA's great strengths — imaging, mathematics and nanoscience — and their selection by the Keck Foundation is well-deserved."
The UCLA project will expand real-world applications of "compressive sensing," a method that uses mathematical algorithms to reconstruct complex medical and scientific images and data sets precisely from sparse amounts of information — similar to an artist accurately filling in the details of a face when given a simple outline of its features.
The project's lead principal investigator is Paul S. Weiss, director of UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) and a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of materials science and engineering who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences.
Principal investigators at UCLA on the project include Andrea Bertozzi, director of computational and applied mathematics at UCLA and a professor of mathematics who holds the Betsy Wood Knapp Chair in Innovation and Creativity; Mark Cohen, director of the National Institutes of Health–funded UCLA Semel NeuroImaging Training Program and a professor of psychiatry with joint appointments in psychology, neurology, radiology, biomedical engineering and biomedical physics; and Stanley Osher, a professor of mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering and one of the most cited authors in mathematics and computer science.
