Li Wang, PhD, and Soumya Rahima Benhabbour, MSc, PhD, were selected as Yang Family Biomedical Scholars in the ninth installment of this annual School of Medicine award.
The UNC School of Medicine has named two outstanding researchers as recipients of the ninth annual Yang Family Biomedical Scholars Award!
They are: Li Wang, PhD, associate professor of Radiology and member of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC); and Soumya Rahima Benhabbour, MSc, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Lampe Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State University and UNC-Chapel Hill, adjunct associate professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Each faculty member will receive a generous grant to be used at their discretion for biomedical research projects at the UNC School of Medicine. The researchers are now members of the Yang Family Society of Biomedical Scholars, which will host its annual seminar to highlight their work later this summer. The awards were made possible through donations from Yuanqing Yang, Chairman and CEO of Lenovo, with additional financial support from Mr. To Hing Wu, an associate to Mr. Yang.
“We are extremely grateful for Mr. Yang and Mr. Wu’s continued support of our School of Medicine’s research mission,” said Blossom Damania, PhD, Vice Dean for Research at the UNC School of Medicine. “Their generous support has catalyzed the research of our Yang Scholars, who are working at the forefront of the most pressing biomedical research questions.”
With the Yang Scholars program, the UNC School of Medicine has established a community of dedicated, promising young tenured faculty. The award recognizes faculty that have made significant scholarly contributions to their field while also receiving national recognition for their research.
Dr. Wang’s funded research focuses on lifespan brain analysis, infant cerebellar imaging, and computational biomarkers for early autism detection. He was recently recognized as a 2025 Distinguished Investigator by the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research, underscoring his national prominence and sustained research excellence. Wang also received the NIH Career Development Award and four NIH R01 grants as Principal Investigator, and currently leads three active R01 projects totaling nearly $10 million.
With over 200 peer-reviewed publications, more than 17,000 citations, and an h-index of 65, Dr. Wang’s scholarly record exemplifies sustained innovation and influence. He and colleagues worked to develop field-defining platforms such as iBEAT V2.0, a widely used AI-powered infant imaging service, and the BME-X foundation model, which unifies motion correction, denoising, super-resolution, harmonization, and tissue segmentation within a single, scalable framework. Its robustness and reliability have led to its integration into the national HEALthy Brain and
Child Development (HBCD) Study standard imaging pipelines. Additionally, Wang and colleagues developed the LifespanStrip, the lifespan-generalizable skull-stripping framework, addressing a major bottleneck in neuroimaging: accurate brain extraction across all ages.
These tools have redefined standards for MRI enhancement and analysis, enabling tens of thousands of researchers worldwide to process complex datasets with unprecedented accuracy and reproducibility. His work in Nature Protocols and two works in Nature Biomedical Engineering have established new methodological standards in infant brain analysis and lifespan MRI enhancement and analysis.
Dr. Benhabbour’s highly innovative research is largely dedicated to improving women’s health around the world. Her multidisciplinary research interests focuses on understanding basic scientific processes and developing new technologies with applications in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. Her work is at the intersection of innovative engineering tools, biomaterials, and chemistry to develop innovative platform technologies for drug delivery and cell therapies. Specifically, the platforms that she developed are unique and can be very useful in very diverse diseases that range from glioblastoma (GBM) treatment to regenerative medicine to HIV treatment and prevention with a large focus on women’s health and multipurpose prevention technologies.
Dr. Benhabbour’s work is highly motivated by current limitations in women’s health, e.g. as related to non-existent bespoke therapies and the fallback on one-size and one-dose fits all devices and treatments leading to limited efficacy and low patient compliance. Her efforts include developing novel and translatable solutions for healthcare challenges facing women in lower- and middle-income countries. Benhabbour founded a UNC spinoff company Anelleo, Inc. (https://anelleo.com/) for which she raised over $7.5M in non-dilutive funding to advance the company’s first product for infertility treatment. This endeavor has helped job creation and technology growth in North Carolina.
As an independent faculty since 2017, Benhabbour has made significant contributions in the field of sustained release delivery systems. Her technologies have received over $17M in funding from NIH, the Gates Foundation, Merck, USAID, and PEPFAR. She is also the primary investigator for a number of grants, including 3 NIH grants that created $8.4 million that funds research for the University. Her research effort has also translated into 4 issued patents, 5 patent applications, and 53 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals such as Nature Communications, Journal of Controlled Release, Biomaterials, and Advanced Healthcare Materials.
Media contact: Brittany Phillips, Communications Specialist, UNC Health | UNC School of Medicine