Achuta Kadambi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a $175,000 award from the National Science Foundation.
The Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award recognizes new faculty and was given to Kadambi, who was recently appointed assistant professor in 2018, for his research on computational thermal imaging. With the money, Kadambi and colleagues will develop algorithms for thermal cameras that operate at long-wave infrared wavelengths. If successful, his team’s research may improve search and rescue missions by finding survivors obscured by smoke or fire.
Kadambi’s research interests include computational imaging, computer vision, robotics and machine learning. He was named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for science and is the recipient of the U.S.-Israel Science Foundation’s Rahamimoff Award.