Vlasov: Founder Professor in Engineering
Professorship: Founder Professor in Engineering
In 2013 the University of Illinois announced the establishment of the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative, a $100 million investment in the future of Engineering at Illinois. Supported by a pledge from The Grainger Foundation, this initiative will have far-reaching impact in several ECE research areas and the educational mission of the department. In particular, the initiative will focus on supporting research in the areas of big data and bioengineering.
The initiative will provide source funds to endow 35 professorships and chairs. Twenty-six of these will focus specifically on the areas of big data and bioengineering, and many will go toward recruiting senior faculty to Illinois in these research areas.
Faculty: Yurii Vlasov
Dr. Yurii Vlasov is a Founder Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is tenured with the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Bio-Engineering, as well as affiliated with Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. At Illinois he established two experimental labs: the first one focused on integrated photonics for biomedical applications and the second lab dedicated to experimental systems neuroscience. These two main directions reflect his current interest in applications of engineering solutions to life sciences.
Prior to joining Illinois, Dr. Vlasov held various research and managerial positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in N.Y. where he led broad company-wide efforts in integrated silicon nanophotonics and more recently in neuromorphic computing architectures. He initiated the Silicon Nanophotonics project in 2001 and managed it for over 15 years from its early fundamental research stage up to commercial manufacturing of optical transceivers for large-scale datacenters and supercomputers.
Prior to IBM, Dr. Vlasov developed semiconductor nanophotonics at the N.E.C. Research Institute in Princeton, N.J. and at the Strasbourg IPCMS Institute in France. For over a decade, he was also a Research Scientist with the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology in St. Petersburg, Russia working on optics of nanostructured semiconductors. He received his M.S. from the University of St. Petersburg (1988) and Ph.D from the Ioffe Institute (1994), both in physics.