Foundation Awards $1M to UCLA Scientists

A team of UCLA scientists won a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for research aimed at reshaping and improving how images and large data sets are collected and analyzed, it was announced Wednesday.

The UCLA project will expand real-world applications of "compressive sensing," a method that uses mathematical algorithms to reconstruct complex medical and scientific images and data sets precisely from sparse amounts of information, according to the university.

"Our goal is to leverage mathematical advances to transform the way imaging and related data are acquired, analyzed and understood," said Paul S. Weiss, the project's lead investigator.

"The result will be richer, more meaningful data through significant changes in how experiments are currently conducted and analyzed," he said. "In so doing, we hope to advance the science of imaging."

Weiss, director of UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, said that if the project is successful, the advances in science, engineering and medicine will apply broadly across other fields.

"We are uniquely placed to develop the theory, to carry out the initial experiments, to generalize the results and to disseminate the tools we create," said Weiss, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and of materials science and engineering who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences.

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