PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mert Rory Sabuncu

Also known as Mert Sabuncu, Mert R. Sabuncu

Mert Sabuncu is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech and Cornell Engineering who develops machine learning methods for medical imaging. After a Princeton Ph.D. in 2006, he did a postdoc at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and joined the faculty of the Martinos Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He moved to Cornell in 2017, received an NSF CAREER Award in 2018, and coauthored VoxelMorph, a convolutional neural network for deformable medical image registration published in 2018 and 2019. In 2021, he moved to Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine, and in 2025 he coauthored the Krakencoder brain connectome tool in Nature Methods. Since July 2026, he is Associate Dean for Research at Cornell Tech and also vice chair of AI and engineering research at Weill Cornell Medicine Radiology.

Timeline

  1. 2001–2006

    A Princeton doctorate

    He earns a B.S. in electrical and electronics engineering at Middle East Technical University in Ankara in 2001 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton University in 2006. His dissertation work focuses on establishing spatial correspondence across multiple clinical scans.

  2. 2010–2011

    Faculty at the Martinos Center

    After a postdoc at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, working with Polina Golland on biomedical image analysis, he joins the faculty of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He receives a Catalyst KL2 Merit Award from Harvard in 2010 and a K25 Career Development Grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering in 2011.

  3. 2017–2018

    Assistant professor at Cornell

    In 2017, he leaves the Martinos Center for Cornell Engineering, where his new lab officially starts; he is an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering with a secondary appointment in biomedical engineering. He receives an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2018.

  4. 2018–2019

    VoxelMorph for image registration

    With Guha Balakrishnan, Amy Zhao, John Guttag and Adrian Dalca, he coauthors VoxelMorph, a convolutional neural network that maps a pair of medical images to a registration field, with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods and speed orders of magnitude faster. The work appears at CVPR in 2018 and in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging in 2019, where a second training setting uses auxiliary segmentations.

  5. 2021

    Moving to Cornell Tech

    In 2021, he moves to Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, where he is a professor. He leads a research group that spans both and focuses on artificial intelligence for medical imaging.

  6. 2025

    Krakencoder in Nature Methods

    In 2025, he coauthors the Krakencoder in Nature Methods, a connectome mapping tool that translates between structural and functional brain connectivity through a shared latent representation. Its structural-to-functional mapping has identifiability 42–54% higher than existing models.

  7. Since July 2026

    Associate Dean for Research

    In July 2026, Cornell Tech announces him as Associate Dean for Research, a newly created post focused on expanding the campus's research profile and building research partnerships. He is also the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell Tech and Cornell Engineering, a professor of radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, and vice chair of AI and engineering research at Weill Cornell Medicine Radiology.

Career

  1. Since 2026Weill Cornell MedicineVice Chair of AI and Engineering Research
  2. Since 2017Cornell UniversityAssistant Professor, Professor
  3. Until 2010MIT CSAILPostdoctoral Researcher
  4. From 2010Mass General Brigham

Education

  1. 2006Princeton UniversityPhD in electrical engineering
  2. 2001Middle East Technical UniversityB.S. in electrical and electronics engineering

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Cornell University. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Cornell University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  3. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Cornell University. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Cornell University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Mert Sabuncu | Cornell Duffield Engineering duffield.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Mert Rory Sabuncu people.csail.mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Awards Directory | Department of Computer Science | Cornell Bowers cs.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [1802.02604] An Unsupervised Learning Model for Deformable Medical Image Registration arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. [1809.05231] VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Cornell Tech - Mert Sabuncu tech.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Krakencoder: a unified brain connectome translation and fusion tool | Nature Methods nature.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. New Associate Deans for Research and Education at Cornell Tech tech.cornell.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.