Prof. Aydogan Ozcan of Electrical Engineering named Guggenheim Fellow

Aydogan Ozcan, Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering and Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA, has been awarded a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is one of three UCLA faculty members to receive the honor this year.

Ozcan leads research in photonics with applications to nano- and bio-technologies. These advances help put powerful, laboratory-level imaging, sensing and diagnostics technologies into portable, inexpensive, smartphone-based devices designed by computational techniques to address medical and public health needs, particularly in developing countries.

Ozcan is also an HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, supervising more than 40 UCLA undergraduate researchers each year. Among his numerous honors, Ozcan received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2011, the U.S. government’s highest award for researchers at the outset of their careers. He was profiled in the April 2013 issue of UCLA magazine.

This year the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 173 Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse array of scholars, artists and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the foundation’s 93rd competition.