Robert F. Murphy, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology and head of the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, has been elevated to fellow status in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional organization.

Murphy is also professor of Biological Sciences and holds courtesy appointments in the Biomedical Engineering and Machine Learning departments.

Fellow status is a distinction reserved for select members who have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in an IEEE field of interest. The IEEE cited Murphy "for contributions to machine learning algorithms for biological images."

Murphy's career has centered on combining fluorescence-based cell measurements with quantitative and computational methods. In the mid-1990s, his group pioneered the use of machine learning to analyze microscope images of subcellular structures. His group's work over the past 20 years led to the development of the first systems for automatically recognizing all major organelle patterns in 2D and 3D images of cells and tissues, and for building generative models of subcellular organization directly from images.

At CMU, he developed the world's first formal undergraduate program in computational biology in 1987, created master's programs in computational biology and in automated science, and was a founding director of the joint Ph.D. program in computational biology offered by CMU and the University of Pittsburgh. He was the founding director of the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology, which became the Computational Biology Department within the School of Computer Science.

His honors include the Distinguished Service Award from the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry, an honorary professorship at Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Research Award. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

The total number of fellows selected by IEEE in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting IEEE membership. A complete list of the Class of 2020 fellows is available on the IEEE site.