Prof. Kadambi wins IEEE-HKN Under 35 Award

The prestigious award includes winners who have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, National Medal of Science, among other recognitions. 

Prof. Kadambi has been named this year’s recipient of the IEEE-HKN young professional award. Beginning in 1936, the IEEE-HKN has awarded a maximum of one award per year to an electrical engineer under 35 years of age. Previous winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, National Medal of Science, and include tenured faculty at Stanford and MIT.

Kadambi is the first UCLA winner in recent years. His key inventions include new types of circuits that adapt to the variability of human beings. This enables life-saving devices like medical devices to be more inclusive to people of different skin types, sexes, or ages. Kadambi is currently working with Dr. Laleh Jalilian, a medical school faculty at UCLA, to deploy the research to patients. 

We caught up with Prof. Kadambi and asked him a couple questions about his research, including what he enjoyed the most.

“The most enjoyable part of research is the students I get to work with. Since I started as a faculty, PhD students Pradyumna Chari has been a sounding board for these problems, and has been joined by PhD students Sasha Vilesov and Ellin Zhao. This project is also not possible without the rigorous clinical collaboration of UCLA medical school faculty Dr. Laleh Jalilian,” said Prof. Kadambi.

When asked about the direction of the research in the future, he stated:

“We are placing a bet that 21st century society demands that life-saving medical devices work for all humans, not just a subset. If this bet is correct, I envision research like ours will be a critical part of future products that are deployed in hospitals.”