Professor Vu Ngoc Tam of the University of Colorado in the US, the founder and CEO of Earable Inc, has been awarded a 2020 Sloan Research Fellowship for computer science by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Tam is one of 126 new fellows chosen from nearly 1,000 nominees for the award this year and only the second Vietnamese national to win it since the first fellowships were announced in 1995.

Tam has focused on building new devices that could make healthcare easier for many people in the US and beyond. He helped to develop Earable, a wearable tool that looks a bit like smartphone earbuds and can sense brain signals, eye motion and other head activity in users.

To bring the technology to customers worldwide later this year, he founded Earable Inc, which now has more than 15 employees.

Tam said, “This fellowship will allow me to continue to innovate and develop a next generation of wearable devices to improve humans cognitive function and well-being from around and inside their ears.”

He won the NSF CAREER award last year and Google Faculty Award in 2018 for this line of research.

The Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most prestigious designations bestowed on early career scientists in North America. — VNS