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University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty members Lili He, Govindarajan Srimathveeravalli and VP Nguyen have been named Senior Members of the 2026 class of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). 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.”

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He, professor and food science department head, serendipitously stumbled upon her first of seven patents when one of her students accidentally discovered that the chemical coating He’s lab was working on had an unexpected property. He had been awarded a grant from the USDA to help develop a method and technology for quickly and accurately quantifying how many bacteria are in food—one of the core problems in food science. The team developed a hypothesis that involved a complex, multi-step protocol, but it turned out that the chemical coating itself eliminated all the intermediate, and costly, steps. 

That coating is now the backbone of a patent for BactiSee, a rapid surface-bacteria detection system for food processing, pharmaceutical and healthcare environments. He has also launched a startup, HertZ Innovation Tech, to bring BactiSee to market with her postdoc Yuzhen Zhang. 

“I always tell my students, ‘if you see something unexpected in your experiment, you need to keep looking at it because you might have just discovered something new,’” says He. “You have to follow your curiosity.”

But, He points out, inventions require more than curiosity—they require patents. “Scientists are great at research,” she says, “but then they don’t protect their work with patents. This is something UMass Amherst does very well, and our Technology Transfer Office is a crucial resource in helping to move research out of the lab and into the public, where it can do the most good.”

He points to UMass Amherst’s wider culture of collegiality as indispensable to her success. The Technology Transfer Office, the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, where He directs the Raman, IR and XRF Core Facility, as well as the Berthiaume Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship have all helped to create an ecosystem of entrepreneurship supportive of invention. UMass Dining, University Health Services and Environmental Health & Safety were early BactiSee adopters and crucial partners in helping to translate He’s research into an applicable invention.

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Srimathveeravalli, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering and director of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, holds several patents for medical devices for minimally invasive therapy and image-guided treatments.

“My lab develops technology to advance image-guided therapy,” he says. “In these procedures, a physician—with a really tiny incision—inserts a needle or a catheter into diseased tissue to treat it. We use electrical energy as a therapeutic modality.” The catheter allows the electricity to reach deep within the body to kill the cancer cells without destroying the organ.

He highlights upcoming technologies that are based on this principle, including a diagnostic system that reimagines cancer biopsy, medical devices and energy delivery approaches for arresting early-stage bladder cancer, and a catheter-based system that can clear tumors or plaque from major blood vessels.

“We have these wonderful discoveries being made in the lab, and these discoveries must leave the lab and go out into the wild as products so that society can benefit,” Srimathveeravalli says. “This recognition [by NAI] provides me a platform to evangelize the importance of such research translation on our campus. I want to put out the word that, if anybody is thinking, ‘How do I do take my technology out of the lab, commercialize? How do I navigate this process?’ they should knock on my door and talk to me.”

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VP Nguyen, assistant professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences 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.

“UMass Amherst’s inductees in the NAI Class of 2026 Senior Members join a distinguished group of over 700 scientists and researchers from around the world,” says Sundar Krishnamurty, vice provost for innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. “This honor recognizes their significant contributions to our innovation ecosystem as evidenced by their success in securing patents and bringing to life technologies that impact the welfare of our society.”

“This year’s Senior Member Class is a truly impressive cohort. These innovators come from a variety of fields and disciplines, translating their technologies into tangible impact,” said Paul R. Sanberg, FNAI, president of NAI. “I commend them on their incredible pursuits and I’m honored to welcome them to the Academy.”

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.