Prof. Shan Lin receives NSF CAREER award to study safety and security in connected hospitals
August 26, 2016
Dr. Shan Lin, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been awarded the National Science Foundation's Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, which is given to young faculty members for research and educational activities. This award will support Dr. Lin's work on ensuring the safety and security of networks in hospitals.
Dr. Lin, whose project is titled "Safe and Secure Network Control for Smart and Connected Hospitals," will receive $450,000 over the next five years to support this work.
"Many hospitals in the US today have deployed wireless infrastructure as modern medical devices are increasingly equipped with wireless functionalities," explained Dr. Lin. "Wireless networks interconnect these systems with the medical cloud and electronic health record systems to provide real-time healthcare information to physicians and patients."
The problem is that network systems are not designed with the medical context in mind, such as a patient's psychological state or the caregiver's workflow. "We are facing an urgent challenge to investigate and integrate context into network and security control under safety requirements," Dr. Lin continued.
Dr. Lin will study and propose new types of networking solutions for medical applications, and he will design and deploy a new open source medical device and sensor network.
Based on this project, Dr. Lin is developing graduate and undergraduate courses on mobile cloud computing and smart systems. Considering the popularity of health applications among students, he expects these courses to attract undergraduate students to become involved with research, which could have a long-lasting impact on their career as scientists and engineers.
More information about Dr. Lin's research can be found at his website.
Dr. Lin received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Virginia in 2010. From 2010 until 2014 he was an Assistant Professor at Temple University. In 2014, he joined Stony Brook's Electrical and Computer Engineering department as an Assistant Professor.