Mert Rory Sabuncu*

 

(Last update: September 28, 2016)

 

I am moving to Cornell University!

I will be Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a secondary appointment in Biomedical Engineering.

My research interests are in biomedical data analysis, in particular imaging data, and with an application emphasis on neuroscience and neurology. I use tools from signal/image processing, probabilistic modeling, statistical inference, computer vision, computational geometry, graph theory, and machine learning to develop algorithms that allow us to learn from and exploit large-scale biomedical data.

 

I will be recruiting graduate students and post-docs for my brand new lab at Cornell Engineering. We will officially start in the summer of 2017. If you are considering applying to Cornell for graduate school (ECE or BME) and have research interests that overlap with mine, please indicate this in your application. Feel free to check out my research vision statement. If youÕre looking for a post-doc position, see my advertisement.

 

I received a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, where my dissertation work focused on the image processing problem of establishing spatial correspondence across multiple clinical scans. I then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to do a post-doc at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where I worked with Polina Golland on biomedical image analysis.

In the coming year I will transition from a faculty position at A.A Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School) to Cornell.

 

*Pronunciation of my last name: saboundjou

 

What's in a name?

Mert: Brave, manly, red-blooded, manful, chivalrous. Borrowed from the Persian word merd and is commonly used in modern day Turkish. A good pronunciation can be found here: http://forvo.com/word/mert/

Rory: Anglicized form of the Irish name Ruaidhri, which means "red king" from Irish ruadh "red" combined with r’ "king". This apparently was the name of the last high king of Ireland, reigning in the 12th century.

Sabuncu: Maker or seller of soap. Sabun has its roots in Lingua-Franca and literally means soap in many different languages, including Turkish. "cu" is a Turkish suffix that denotes profession.