Achuta Kadambi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been named to Forbes magazine’s 2019 “30 Under 30” list for science. The annual list honors rising stars in 20 different industries.

Kadambi’s research focus aims to give robots extraordinary vision capabilities beyond what human eyes are capable of, such as cars that can see around corners; rescue robots that can see through thick smoke; and vision systems that can peer deep inside biological tissue to guide next-generation surgical robots.

Kadambi joined UCLA Samueli after earning his doctorate from MIT. He teaches classes on computational imaging, computer vision and digital image processing, and he leads the Visual Machines Research Group.

His honors include the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Computational Photography, the Lemelson-MIT student prize, the Qualcomm 100K Fellowship; and the Charles Draper Fellowship. Kadambi’s doctoral work has resulted in seven issued patents and he is the founding advisor for Polar-I, a Silicon Valley imaging startup. 

Kadambi is co-authoring the first textbook on computational imaging, scheduled to appear in MIT Press.