Professor Ning Lin and graduate alumna Renzhi Jing have been recognized by the Research & Development Council of New Jersey with the 2026 Edison Patent Award for their AI system that assists with risk analysis for hurricanes and severe storms.
Lin, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, is an expert in hurricane analysis, and her work integrates science, engineering and policy to better understand storms and their impacts in a changing climate. She has assisted governments with long-term storm planning and has led a multi-institutional program to better understand hurricane risk for the National Science Foundation. Jing was a member of Lin’s lab while obtaining her Ph.D. at Princeton and is now a sustainability scientist at Google and Stanford University.
After obtaining her doctorate at Princeton in 2010, Lin worked as a research scientist at MIT until she joined the Princeton faculty in 2012. She is the recipient of the Walter Orr Roberts Lectureship from the American Meteorological Society, the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Natural Hazards Early Career Award and the Global Environmental Change Early Career Award from the American Geophysical Union.
This is the 47th annual award given by the New Jersey R&D Council in recognition of invention and innovation. The system developed by Lin and Jing was among 15 patents receiving a patent award this year. The Council also recognized Princeton researchers for a method of engineering stable and efficient proteins that act as a molecular glue for protein fragments. Tom Muir, the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of 1965 Professor of Chemistry, was recognized for the discovery along with co-researchers Adam Stevens, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Neel Shah, now a professor at Columbia University.
