Four Johns Hopkins faculty members—Xun Jia, Rajat Mittal, Mihaela Pertea, and Sri Sarma—have been named fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). They are among 171 engineers and researchers in this year's class who were at an induction ceremony on Monday in Arlington, Virginia.
Membership in AIMBE's College of Fellows is reserved for the top 2% of medical and biological engineers—individuals who have made outstanding contributions to teaching, research, and innovation in their fields.
More about the 2025 AIMBE fellows from Johns Hopkins:
Xun Jia
Jia, professor and chief of the Medical Physics Division in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, uses cutting-edge methods for imaging-guided radiation therapy to precisely target tumors, improving treatment efficacy and safety. He develops artificial intelligence-based tools that help clinicians optimize cancer treatment plans. Jia makes valuable contributions to medical physics research by creating simulation tools to predict radiation's effects and building rodent-sized irradiation devices to help investigators test new radiation approaches in model animals. He was one of the first researchers to repurpose powerful graphic processor units used for video game graphics to make routine radiation tasks like dose calculations and image processing 100 times faster, revolutionizing the field.
He was recognized "for seminal contributions to technology development and clinical translation of medical physics in radiation oncology."
Rajat Mittal
Mittal, professor and director of master's degree studies in the Whiting School of Engineering's Department of Mechanical Engineering, is an expert in computational fluid dynamics. His research focuses on biomedical fluid dynamics, biological and bioinspired locomotion (swimming and flying), bioacoustics, active flow control, fluid-structure interaction, and high-performance computing. Mittal collaborates extensively with researchers from other disciplines, such as zoology, cardiology, robotics, biomechanics, and dynamics, and has a secondary appointment at the School of Medicine.
He was recognized "for impactful developments of immersed boundary methods and for their insightful application in cardiology, gastric digestion, COVID-19 and swimming biomechanics."
Mihaela Pertea
Pertea is an associate professor of biomedical engineering and genetic medicine, with a secondary appointment in computer science. A leading computational biologist, she has been at the forefront of gene finding and genome analysis since the late 1990s. Her pioneering work integrates genome sequencing technologies, machine learning, data science, and human genomics, leading to widely used open-source tools for annotating and analyzing DNA and RNA sequences across species, including humans, Plasmodium falciparum, Arabidopsis thaliana, and many others. Her tool StringTie is one of the most widely adopted systems for RNA-seq assembly and quantification. With more than 58,000 citations, she ranks among the top 1% most cited researchers in her field.
She was recognized "for outstanding contributions to computational genomics, including pioneering methods in transcriptome assembly and innovative computational tools for gene annotation."
Sri Sarma
Sarma is a professor of biomedical engineering, the associate director of the Institute of Computational Medicine, and vice dean for graduate education at the Whiting School of Engineering. She develops computational, data-driven, and biological approaches to advance the knowledge and treatment of diseases of the nervous system including epilepsy, chronic pain, Parkinson's disease, and insomnia. She also harnesses dynamical systems and control theory to understand how the brain governs complex behaviors, including motor control and decision-making. Sarma is the executive director of Neurotech Harbor, a technology accelerator focused on advancing the development of medical devices that diagnose, treat, and manage neurological disorders.
She was recognized "for pioneering contributions in epilepsy diagnostics and therapeutics with novel network models, and for leadership in NeuroTech translation."
