Assistant Professor VP Nguyen Named Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors 2026 Class
Nguyen shares this honor with two other University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty members.
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Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professor VP Nguyen has been named a Senior Member of the 2026 class of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
Nguyen shares this honor with two other University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty members: Professor Lili He of the College of Natural Sciences and Associate Professor Govindarajan Srimathveeravalli of the Riccio College of Engineering.
The Senior Member recognition program was created to recognize active faculty, scientists, and administrators at NAI Member Institutions who have successfully produced, patented, and commercialized technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society and economic progress.
“UMass Amherst is committed to fostering an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem that helps connect cutting-edge research to real-world applications, bringing revolutionary solutions to life for our global community,” says Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. “I am proud of our three new Senior Members of the National Academy of Inventors and celebrate their visionary work which spans contributions across the intellectual landscape from food science, computer science, and biomedical engineering.”
Nguyen, a member of the CICS faculty since 2023, studies wireless and sensing systems. “We are able to solve a very diverse set of problems,” he says. “When we see problems, we are able to go deep into what is missing and then try to correlate it with our sensor and system expertise.”
Applications of his sensor technology include device-free sleep breathing monitoring, tongue- and teeth-manipulated computing systems via an ear-based wearable, wearable devices for cardiovascular health, and a bioelectronic sensing and stimulation platform for adaptive balance therapy. His sensing network research has also been used for drone swarm tracking for alternative firework displays.
“My research is in the intersection between industry, academia and the end user,” Nguyen adds. “We are very at the edge of what is missing in the industry and what is missing in society. When we see a clear societal impact, we push forward aggressively, and that’s how we convert a lot of our research into startup companies. Every technology that we develop in the lab would be able to become a real product in the next couple years—that is the goal.”
This year’s class of NAI Senior Members is the largest to date, hailing from 82 NAI Member Institutions across the globe and collectively holding over 2,000 U.S. patents. A full list of the 2026 Class of Senior Members is available here.
Today, there are 946 Senior Members holding over 11,000 U.S. patents.
The 2026 class of Senior Members will be honored during the Senior Member Induction Ceremony at NAI’s 15th Annual Conference taking place June 1-4 in Los Angeles.
