Shan Lin’s NSF CAREER Award Focuses on Smart and Connected Hospitals

Shan Lin, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, one of the most prestigious honors given to support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research education.

Lin will receive $450k during the next five years for his research — Safe and Secure Network Control for Smart and Connected Hospitals — which seeks to improve safety and security of networks in a hospital setting.

According to Lin, hospitals will benefit from the ability to collect critical data on a patient’s psychological state and the caregiver’s workflow using a new medical device and sensor network. This improvement in resources is expected to collect precise and complete data on patients for accurate documentation and maximum care quality, and enable big data analysis for medical application. Through this CAREER research, Lin will study and propose new medical applications and networking solutions, as well as design and deploy an open source medical device and sensor network.

Through his teaching efforts at Stony Brook, Lin will create graduate and undergraduate courses on mobile cloud computing and smart systems that will allow students to be involved in this groundbreaking research. If Lin’s research is as effective as intended, these improved medical technologies will likely be implemented in hospitals and medical facilities worldwide.

“I am really excited for and proud of Professor Lin and the entire college as this is our fourth CAREER award for this year,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS). “What better testament to the excellence of our junior faculty. Shan Lin’s work is at the frontier of engineering-driven medicine, a strategic thrust for CEAS. His work will help shape the hospitals of the future through the convergence of sensors, big data and analytics with health care delivery.”

Previous to his NSF CAREER award, Lin received five NSF grants, including Heterogeneous Large-Scale Telemedicine for Cardiology Patients, Multiple-level Predictive Control of Mobile Cyber Physical Systems with Correlated Context, and Non-isotropic Networked Sensor Deployment for Smart Buildings.