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02/26/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 02/26/2026 09:05

Six UC San Diego Faculty Elected to National Academy of Inventors for 2026

Published Date

February 26, 2026

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Six professors from the University of California San Diego have been named Senior Members of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in recognition of their outstanding achievements in innovation.

The UC San Diego honorees in NAI's 2026 class of Senior Members are Omar Akbari, Brian P. Head, Abdoulaye Ndao, Kenneth Vecchio, Edward Wang and Yunde Zhao. This year's cohort of 230 emerging inventors is the largest to date, hailing from 82 NAI member institutions around the globe and collectively holding over 2,000 U.S. patents.

NAI Senior Members are recognized for innovative research and producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society and economic progress. Members also have a track record of securing patents, licensing and commercialization for the technologies they create, while also educating and mentoring the next generation of inventors.

The 2026 class of Senior Members will be honored at NAI's 15th Annual Conference taking place June 1 to 4, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.

Omar Akbari

Omar Akbari, a faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences, holds the Tata Chancellor's Endowed Professorship in Cell and Developmental Biology. A pioneering innovator at the intersection of synthetic biology and genome engineering, Akbari designs scalable genetic systems to address grand challenges in global health, agriculture and environmental sustainability. His work advances CRISPR-based platforms that enable programmable control of insect populations - engineering solutions to reduce transmission of malaria, dengue and Zika, while also protecting high-value crops from destructive agricultural pests.

Akbari's laboratory developed the precision-guided sterile insect technique (pgSIT), a deployable genetic population-control technology that reprograms sex-determination and fertility pathways to generate sterile male insects at scale. Engineered for robustness, efficiency and field compatibility, pgSIT represents a systems-level alternative to conventional chemical control strategies. The platform is being commercially translated for crop protection by Agragene and for mosquito-borne disease control by Synvect, both UC San Diego spin-off companies co-founded by Akbari.

To enable industrial-scale implementation, his lab also engineered SEPARATOR, a genetic sex-separation system that provides high-throughput production of male-only cohorts - an essential operational component for large-scale population suppression programs. Beyond vector and pest management, Akbari's group demonstrated the versatility of programmable genetic systems through development of a rapid CRISPR-based diagnostic platform for SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the integration of molecular engineering, quantitative design and translational deployment, Akbari's work establishes new technological paradigms for population-scale biological control.

Brian P. Head

Brian Head is a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System. His research area is AAV-mediated gene therapy, an emerging therapeutic approach that uses viruses to deliver therapeutic genes to specific target cells. Specifically, his work centers on caveolin, a protein in the brain that is essential for synaptic signaling and neuroplasticity. By using AAV-mediated gene therapy to deliver caveolin directly to the brain, his work has resulted in promising therapeutics for several neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. After demonstrating promise in animal studies, several of these treatments have now progressed to first-in-human clinical trials.

In addition to holding multiple patents related to his gene therapy work, Head's achievements have also been recognized with the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) through the Department of Veterans Affairs, the highest honor given by the U.S. Government to early-career scientists. He has also presented his work at the San Diego VA Research Week symposium and serves on several VA subcommittees, along with the Health Sciences School of Medicine Electives Committee and the Senate Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP). He also continues to actively mentor residents, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, undergraduate students pursuing independent research credits, and other trainees in his lab.

Abdoulaye Ndao

Abdoulaye Ndao, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, develops next-generation optical technologies to detect and study extremely small biological substances. His work explores how light interacts with matter at the nanometer scale.

Ndao is recognized for inventing advanced metadevices - specially engineered materials that manipulate light in unusual ways - for sensing and imaging. These include light-based sensors capable of detecting biological molecules more than 100 times smaller than previously possible. To achieve this feat, Ndao developed photonic devices that are both sensitive and robust - a combination long considered incompatible. Highly sensitive devices are often fragile, and even minor manufacturing flaws can cause them to fail. This makes them costly and difficult to produce at scale. Meanwhile, strengthening them often reduces their precision. Ndao's lab overcame this tradeoff by harnessing a rare light effect known as subwavelength phase singularity, which creates a point of complete darkness at an extremely small scale. At this point, light becomes extraordinarily sensitive to its surroundings, yet it remains stable. By building this effect into a tiny, chip-scale device made of layered gold nanorods and an ultra-thin polymer film, Ndao's team produced a sensor that is both precise and durable.

Ndao was recently named UC San Diego's first Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. His honors also include a Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics, Hellman Fellowship, iCANX Young Scientist Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Reidy Family Career Development Professorship.

Kenneth Vecchio

Kenneth Vecchio, a distinguished professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is a leader in engineering advanced metal and ceramic materials that withstand extreme environments and make industrial equipment stronger, safer and longer-lasting. He has transformed how new materials are discovered and brought to market.

Vecchio founded the company Scoperta - later acquired by Oerlikon Metco - to accelerate the discovery and development of high-performance alloys. There, he led the creation of the Rapid Alloy Development (RAD) platform, a powerful computational system capable of analyzing tens of millions of potential material combinations and billions of performance data points. By rapidly identifying commercially viable candidates, the platform significantly shortens development timelines. Its successes include an iron-based alloy for wear-resistant plates that last two to four times longer than previous technologies, and a copper-based material for drill bits with double the lifespan of leading alternatives. Vecchio also pioneered a method to make typically brittle ceramics tougher and more resistant to cracking. Additionally, he developed a patent approach that protects innovations based on materials' microstructure rather than their chemical composition. This redefined approach broadens the scope of innovations that can be safeguarded.

At the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, Vecchio helped establish one of the first Departments of NanoEngineering in the U.S. and served as its founding chair from 2007 to 2014. In 2025, he was named a Fellow of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and received the Albert Sauveur Achievement Award.

Edward Wang

Edward Wang is a professor in both the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the Design Lab, and also holds the Jacobs Faculty Chair in Entrepreneurship. His work aims to make reliable health monitoring accessible to billions of people around the world, especially in underserved and low-resource communities. This mission is the core of Billion Labs Inc., a company he co-founded to translate his team's technologies into everyday health care.

Wang is recognized for transforming ordinary smartphones into powerful health monitoring tools. His team develops apps that use smartphones' built-in features - including the camera, vibration motor and motion sensors - to take accurate health measurements. One app measures blood pressure when a user presses a finger against the screen while it vibrates - no cuff or extra accessories required. This technology has been supported by multiple National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers including the a2 Consortium MassAITC on aging technology and the POCTRN CAPCaT center on point-of-care devices. Another app measures grip strength, which can signal a patient's readiness for surgery. Patients can test themselves at home before surgery, allowing doctors to monitor trends, spot early warning signs and better plan procedures. Ultimately, solutions like these could help provide care to many more people beyond the regular confines of hospital walls and improve outcomes.

His work has earned him an NIH Trailblazer Award.

Yunde Zhao

Yunde Zhao is a Tata Chancellor's Endowed Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Biological Sciences. Regularly listed as a highly cited researcher, Zhao studies the plant hormone auxin and is credited for identifying the key enzyme for auxin biosynthesis. Five years ago, Zhao led the development of a breakthrough innovation that has revolutionized how scientists study plants. Zhao's discoveries have been included in three textbooks: Plant Physiology and Development; Organic Chemistry; and Plant Biotechnology and Genetics.

Plant biologists have traditionally used genetically encoded reporters to track how information coded in DNA is converted into specific end products, such as proteins. Previous reporters required sophisticated instruments and/or costly chemicals. In 2020 Zhao and his colleagues invented "RUBY," an inexpensive genetic reporter that provides bright red tracking signals that are clearly visible.

While RUBY has been used to investigate genetics in plants, including rice, corn, soybean, wheat and avocado, researchers are finding the invention useful in a range of other areas, including detecting the presence of pesticides and environmental pollutants. RUBY is also being leveraged in cellular and molecular process studies, as well as inside laboratories and classrooms as a teaching aid. Cquesta, a San Diego-based company developing technologies to sequester carbon in soil and make crops more resilient, is using RUBY to visualize genetic changes in crops.

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