Cai is an associate professor of education and co-director of the Center for the Study of Evaluation/National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. He was honored for his early contributions to measurement and statistical analysis, particularly in the area of statistical computing, and for leadership in shaping statistical practice in education, psychology and health. He is also affiliated with the UCLA Department of Psychology. His work emphasizes the development of new statistical methods for social science research and the application of new and existing methods of research to scholarship in education, psychology and related fields. His research expertise includes measurement and statistical modeling and computing, with wide-ranging applications in educational, psychological and health-related fields.
Vaughan is an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science whose research interests are in machine learning, algorithmic aspects of economics and social computing. Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and analysis of algorithms that allow computers to calculate recommended behaviors or predictions based on empirical data, such as collections of documents on the Web or sets of tagged images. It is applicable to problems as diverse as natural language processing, speech recognition, spam detection, search, computer vision, gene discovery, medical diagnosis and robotics.
Three exceptional young UCLA scientists, Yuri Shprits, Li Cai and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan (shown in photo, left to right), were honored by President Obama on July 31 with Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers ((PECASE). It is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their research careers.
"I think I speak for all the PECASE awardees in saying we were truly moved by the president's speech and encouragement," said UCLA research geophysicist Shprits, on faculty in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. His citation praises him for "early-career leadership and innovative research and modeling in the realm of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts." He studies electron transport and acceleration and loss in the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts and has developed large numerical codes to model the electrons in these belts. The Van Allen radiation belts are two donut-shaped regions surrounding the Earth that contain high-energy particles trapped by the planet’s magnetic field. These particles can be harmful for satellites and humans in space. His research will help satellites guard against hazards and also help with the design of future satellite missions. 
