By Beth Miller
Caitlin Kelleher, PhD, and Lihong Wang, PhD, in the School of Engineering & Applied Science will receive prestigious Outstanding St. Louis Scientist Awards from the Academy of Science St. Louis.
Kelleher, the Hugo F. & Ina Champ Urbauer Career Development Associate Professor, will receive the Innovation Award, which recognizes a scientist or engineer, age 40 or under, who has demonstrated exceptional potential for future accomplishments in science, engineering or technology. Wang, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, will receive the James B. Eads Award, which recognizes a distinguished individual for outstanding achievement in engineering or technology.
The Academy of Science of St. Louis aims to foster the advancement of science and encouragement of public interest in and understanding of the sciences. The awards, which focus on individuals and institutions in St. Louis known worldwide for scientific contributions to research, industry and quality of life, will be given Wednesday, April 9, at the Chase Park Plaza.
Kelleher’s research centers on “democratizing” computer programming to make it accessible for everyone.
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, Kelleher created a programming system, called Storytelling Alice, which presented programming as a means to the end of creating animated stories. She found that Storytelling Alice greatly increased interest in programming: 51 percent of participants using the program in her study snuck extra time to work on their programs. But she also found that many children in the United States don’t have access to a computer science class before college.
When she joined the Washington University faculty in 2007, Kelleher began work on Looking Glass (lookingglass.wustl.edu), a programming environment that explores a variety of mechanisms to support kids learning to program without the support of a teacher or classroom setting. Similar to Storytelling Alice, Looking Glass users write programs to create animated stories that they can share through an online community, where they become potential learning aids. To allow users to learn new things from shared programs, Kelleher and her research group have built tools that enable users to select animations of interest and remix them into their own programs, explore unfamiliar program behavior, automatically generate effective tutorials based on the selected code, and how to harness potential help from expert mentors.
Kelleher and her group also have created a version of Looking Glass that enables physical and occupational therapists to create games for stroke rehabilitation.
Wang and his lab were the founders of a new type of medical imaging that gives physicians a new look at the body’s internal organs, publishing the first paper on the technique in 2003. Called functional photoacoustic tomography, the technique relies on light and sound to create detailed, color pictures of tumors deep inside the body and may eventually help doctors diagnose cancer earlier than is now possible and to more precisely monitor the effects of cancer treatment — all without the radiation involved in X-rays and CT scans or the expense of MRIs.
A leading researcher on new methods of cancer imaging, Wang has received more than 30 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of more than $40 million. His research on non-ionizing biophotonic imaging has been supported by the NIH, National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Defense, The Whitaker Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In 2013, Wang received a 2013 Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was one of only 10 recipients of the award, given to scientists proposing highly innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research. In September 2012 he received one of 10 NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards from among 600 applicants. He also has received the NIH FIRST, the NSF’s CAREER Award, the Optical Society’s C. E. K. Mees Medal and IEEE's Technical Achievement Award.
The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 82 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 700 graduate students and more than 23,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.