Two UC San Diego Faculty Elected to National Academy of Inventors

Massimiliano Di Ventra is a theoretical physicist who has driven technological innovation all his career. He holds 11 patents (including seven foreign patents) in the fields of materials science, DNA/RNA sequencing and computing, and many of which have been licensed. His most significant patents are related to the improvement of the SiO2-SiC interface for high-power electronics and radio frequency applications; methods for the noise reduction in nucleic acid and macromolecule sequencing using his proposed quantum sequencing approach; and the invention of a new computing paradigm he named MemComputing, where memory is used to both store and process information.

He is co-founder of MemComputing, Inc., which works to solve some of the most challenging optimization problems in academia, industry, and the Department of Defense. The company has released cloud-based software and is developing hardware for AI applications.

Di Ventra has delivered more than 350 talks worldwide and has published more than 300 papers and five textbooks. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics, among others. In 2018 he was named Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics.

Lingyan Shi is an expert in imaging and spectroscopy technologies, such as stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) nanoscopy. This imaging technique can visualize chemical signatures such as molecular bonds in cells, tissues or animals without the need for fluorescent markers typically used in biological microscopy. The technology can be a powerful tool for diagnosing and assessing the impact of therapies for neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and aging processes, as well as for drug discovery.

Shi and her team discovered a “golden window” wavelength (1550nm-1870nm) for deep tissue imaging, which they use to observe altered molecular events and cellular machinery in living organisms suffering from aging or disease. In 2024, in collaboration with the UC San Diego School of Medicine, they shed light on how the metabolism of lipids changes in Alzheimer’s disease. They also revealed a new strategy to target this metabolic system with novel and existing drugs.

Shi is also part of a UC San Diego team that is developing a first-of-its-kind, super-resolution microscope for significant advances in the biomedical sciences. Using custom-built materials, the machine, known as a “metamaterial-enabled structured illumination microscope,” has the potential to achieve 10 times the resolution and more than 100 times the measurement speed of similar microscopes at current state-of-the-art levels.