Mert Rory Sabuncu*

About

The Sabuncu Lab is a research group spanning Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine Radiology. We conduct research in the field of biomedical data analysis, in particular imaging data, and with an application emphasis on neuroscience and neurology. We use tools from signal/image processing, probabilistic modeling, statistical inference, computer vision, computational geometry, graph theory, and machine learning to develop algorithms that allow us to learn from and exploit large-scale biomedical data.

Mert Sabuncu received a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, where his dissertation work focused on the image processing problem of establishing spatial correspondence across multiple clinical scans. Mert then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to do a post-doc at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where he worked on biomedical image analysis.

Before joining Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, Mert was a faculty member at the A.A Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School). In 2021, Mert moved to Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, where he is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Mert is a co-founder and executive editor of MELBA (The Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging), a web-based journal devoted to the free and unrestricted access of high quality articles in the broad field that bridges machine learning and biomedical imaging. He also co-launched the Machine Learning in Medicine initiative, which is a Cornell-wide inter-campus collaborative with the goal of bringing together researchers with common interests and complimentary expertise. MLIM also runs a webinar series, which is freely available to all.

* Pronunciation of my last name: saboundjou

Mert: Brave, manly, red-blooded, manful, chivalrous. Borrowed from the Persian word merd and is commonly used in modern day Turkish. A good pronunciation can be found at Forvo-Mert.

Rory: Anglicized form of the Irish name Ruaidhri, which means “red king” from Irish ruadh “red” combined with rí “king”. This apparently was the name of the last high king of Ireland, reigning in the 12th century.

Sabuncu: Maker or seller of soap. Sabun has its roots in Lingua-Franca and literally means soap in many different languages, including Turkish. “cu” is a Turkish suffix that denotes profession. A good pronunciation can be found at Forvo-Sabuncu.