Béla Suki to Deliver 2025 DeLisi Lecture
Eshed Ohn-Bar will receive Early Career Research Excellence Award at April event
In recognition of their contributions to engineering and society, Professor Béla Suki (BME, MSE) has been named the recipient of the 2025 Charles DeLisi Award and Lecture, and Assistant Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar (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 the recipient a forum to discuss their work before the Boston University academic community and the general public.
Suki will present the Charles DeLisi Distinguished Lecture, “Complexity in Translational Biomechanics and Mechanobiology,” on Thursday, April 3, 2025, at 4 p.m., in the Photonics Center Colloquium Room, 8 St. Mary’s Street, room 906. A reception will follow.
Toward a cure for respiratory disease
Suki studies biomechanics and mechanobiology of soft tissues and extracellular matrices, especially related to the lung and vasculature. He has invented a device, called AccuStretch, that mimics the breathing action of the lung, allowing researchers to test treatments on diseased lung tissue from organ donors. Suki has also developed a new way to measure the stiffness of lung tissue, and a computational model aimed at better understanding the progression of pulmonary fibrosis.
Since joining Boston University, initially as a research associate, in 1993, Suki has served on several NIH-funded grants, including a Transformative R01. He has authored or co-authored 246 peer-reviewed articles, 12 book chapters, and a book; and advised more than 30 graduate students and 20 postdoctoral fellow. A fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Suki has earned the Joseph R. Rodarte Award for Scientific Distinction from the American Thoracic Society, and the Evans Center Research Collaborator Award from the BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.
Scalable AI for quality of life
The Early Career Research Award celebrates the significant, recent, and high-impact research accomplishments of ENG’s best faculty early in their careers. Ohn-Bar focuses on developing AI frameworks for systems that improve quality of life, from self-driving cars to wearable technologies for people with disabilities. With support from leading agencies such as the NSF and the U.S. Department of Transportation, he works to integrate computer vision, multimodal sensing, and machine learning to build scalable AI systems that adapt to a variety of users, environments, and applications.
Ohn-Bar’s honors include the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society’s Best PhD Dissertation Award, the Humboldt Fellowship, the Peter J. Levine Career Development Award, and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing Junior Faculty Fellowship.
Father of the Human Genome Project
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.