People

Bhuvnesh Jain

Dr. Bhuvnesh “Bhuv” Jain’s area is cosmology, gravitational lensing and machine learning in astronomy. He is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Natural Sciences, Co-Director of the Penn Center for Particle Cosmology, and Co-Director of the Penn Data Driven Discovery Initiative. He has been a member of the standing faculty at the School of Arts & Sciences since 2001.

“There is more space than ever to be creative, though it has a different flavor. It takes a blend of developing a gut feeling for the subject, as before, and querying massive datasets in new ways, often by developing clever algorithms. Interestingly, it’s sometimes the undergraduate students who ask the most creative questions. So, even though we have advanced technology and big data now, it is no less important to see the problem with fresh eyes and ask bold questions.”

Read more about Dr. Jain here: The Night Sky Is the Limit (Omnia, Spring/Summer 2021

Rene Vidal

Dr. René Vidal, a global pioneer of data science, is the Rachleff University Professor, with joint appointments in the Department of Radiology in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Vidal has been named a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

René Vidal received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (highest honors) from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in 1997 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 and 2003, respectively. He was a research fellow at the National ICT Australia in 2003 and joined The Johns Hopkins University in 2004 as a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Imaging Science.