Schools

Stony Brook Professor Among Presidential Award Winners

Dr. Lilianne Mujica-Parodi recognized by President Barack Obama for early career accomplishments.

A Stony Brook University biomedical researcher has been recognized as a winner of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Barack Obama.

One of 94 people nationwide to receive this honor, Dr. Lilianne Mujica-Parodi is the director of the Laborator for the Study of Emotion and Cognition and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the university's School of Medicine. She is the third Stony Brook professor to win this award in the past three years.

Mujica-Parodi, a resident of Stony Brook, studies the computational neurobiology of human stress from a "complex systems" approach. She described her laboratory team as interdisciplinary, including physicists, mathematicians, engineers, neurologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists.

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"We take techniques adapted from chaos theory and control systems, fields that originated in physics and engineering but now have extended to economics and physiology, and apply them to the brain," she said in an email to Patch. "Just as there are certain types of signature dynamics that suggest 'disease' of an electronic circuit or an economy, we believe that those same techniques can be used to identify vulnerability towards mental or neurological illness, which in some cases, has direct implications for treatment."

Her award is for outstanding research in her field as well as for the application of her research to a curriculum for control systems modeling in grades K-12.

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"It is inspiring to see the innovative work being done by these scientists and engineers as they ramp up their careers – careers that I know will be not only personally rewarding but also invaluable to the nation," Obama said in the official White House announcement.

Mujica-Parodi, 39, began her research at age 15 at the National Institutes of Health mentored by Dr. V. Adrian Parsegian.

"Adrian was a terrific mentor and father-figure to me and still is, and I try to repay the favor by providing other young people with the opportunity to pursue research in my laboratory," she said.


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