Ji-Xin Cheng to Deliver Annual DeLisi Lecture
Ji-Xin Cheng to Deliver Annual DeLisi Lecture
Rabia Yazicigil earns Early Career Research Excellence Award
In recognition of their contributions to engineering and society, the Moustakas Chair Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics Ji-Xin Cheng (ECE, BME, PHYS and CHEM) is the recipient of the 2024 Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture, while Assistant Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) has earned this year’s Early Career Research Excellence Award.
The Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture recognizes researchers with extraordinary records of well-cited scholarship, senior leaders in industry, and inventors of transformative technologies. The event gives each year’s recipient a forum to discuss their work before the Boston University academic community and the general public.
Cheng will present the Charles DeLisi Distinguished Lecture, “Seeing the Unseen Using Molecular Fingerprints,” on Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at 4 p.m., in the Photonics Center Colloquium Room. A reception will follow.
Cheng joined the BU faculty in the summer of 2017 as the Inaugural Theodore Moustakas Chair Professor in Photonics and Optoelectronics. Cheng leads the Ji-Xin Cheng Group, with a mission of manipulating photons for precision medicine. Cheng and his team have been at the forefront of development, discovery, and delivery in the chemical imaging field. Chemical microscopes based on his innovations — including CARS, hyperspectral SRS, mid-infrared photothermal microscopes — are installed and used in many countries.
Cheng has published more than 320 peer-reviewed papers with an h-index of 98. In 2022, Cheng was selected as Boston University’s Innovator of the Year and was most recently awarded the 2024 SPIE Biophotonics Innovator Award. He is co-founder of two companies and is scientific advisor to two others. Cheng is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Institute of Medicine and Biological Engineering, and associate editor of Science Advances.
Early Career Research Excellence Award
Since joining the BU faculty in 2018, Yazicigil has overseen high impact research activity. She is the director of Wireless Integrated Systems and Extreme Circuits Laboratory (WISE-Circuits Laboratory) which has three research areas: Cyber-Secure Biological Systems; All-in-One Data Decoders; and Secure Wireless Communications. Under her direction, the WISE-Circuits Lab has received more than $4.8 million in federal and private sector funding, including from the NSF, BioMADE, and DARPA. Yazicigil has been awarded 13 grants, totaling $13.9 million.
She is also an affiliate of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering, Biological Design Center, Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Biochemistry, and Biomedical Engineering Department.
This year, Yazicigil received the NSF CAREER Award for her research in Cyber-Secure Biological Systems. In 2020 and 2021 she was awarded the Boston University ECE Outstanding Faculty Committee Service Award and in 2024, she was elected to the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) as a distinguished lecturer.
The DeLisi Award was named for Dean Emeritus and Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering Charles DeLisi (BME). Widely considered the father of the Human Genome Project, DeLisi was an early pioneer in computational molecular biology, and he made seminal contributions to theoretical and mathematical immunology. He continues to direct the Biomolecular Systems Laboratory, where more than 100 undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students have trained.
As dean of the BU College of Engineering from 1990 to 2000, DeLisi recruited leading researchers in biomedical, manufacturing, aerospace and mechanical engineering, photonics and other engineering fields, establishing a research infrastructure that ultimately propelled the college into the top ranks of engineering graduate programs. In 1999 he founded—and then chaired for more than a decade—BU’s Bioinformatics Program, the first such program in the nation.