Six new named professor appointments announced

ECE ILLINOIS and the College of Engineering have announced six new named professorships at ECE ILLINOIS. These professorships allow the department to recruit and retain promising researchers and teachers, encouraging them to expand their work and careers at Illinois.

Jennifer Truman Bernhard, Donald Biggar Willett Professorship of Engineering, researches applications-oriented electromagnetic problems with an emphasis on theoretical analysis and experimental investigation. Her research group is supported by a specialized fabrication facility, a new anechoic chamber (the Illinois Wireless Wind Tunnel), Agilent vector network analyzers, and opportunities for collaborations with the Illinois Center for Computational Electromagnetics. Her research focuses on two areas: Electromagnetics for Wireless Communication and Reconfigurable Active and Passive Antennas.

Yoram Bresler, Founder Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) with research interests including compressed sensing, multi-dimensional and statistical signal processing and their applications to inverse problems in imaging, and computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. His research addresses five areas: fast algorithms for tomographic reconstruction, practical compressive sensing, statistical learning for sparse signal representation and compressive sensing, computationally efficient algorithms for bilinear inverse problems, and signal processing for big data.

Joseph W Lyding, Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was recruited to Illinois in 1984 by John Bardeen to work on the 1D charge density wave problem. Since then, he has pioneered many notable technologies, including the first atomic resolution scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in the Midwestern U.S., a novel new STM-based nanofabrication scheme, the benefits of replacing hydrogen with deuterium in CMOS that has been used in commercial production of chips, graphene, and Field-Directed Suptter Sharpening (FDSS), resulting in many patents and well-cited papers. Currently, his research focuses on carbon nanoelectronics for future semiconducting device applications. His group has developed ultra-clean nanotube deposition and STM spectroscopic methodologies, allowing subtle effects to be seen for the first time and to be modeled with first principles theory and simulations.

Elyse Rosenbaum, Melvin & Anne Louise Hassebrock Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, researches component and system-level ESD reliability, mitigation strategies for ESD-induced soft failures, transient latch-up, ESD-robust high-speed I/O circuit design, compact modeling of on-chip ESD protection devices, and machine-learning aided behavioral modeling of microelectronic components and systems. She has authored or co-authored over 150 technical papers, is currently an editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, and is the technical program chair for the 2016 International Reliability Physics Symposium.

Venugopal Varadachari Veeravalli, Henry Magnuski Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) whose research interests span the theoretical areas of detection and estimation, information theory, statistical learning, and stochastic control, with applications to cyberphysical systems, sensor neworks, wireless networks, big data, and genomics. His current research topics include adaptive sequential optimization with application to machine learning, universal outlying sequence detection and identification in large datasets, rate analysis for detection of sparse mixtures in large datasets, quickest change detection and applications (including event detection in power systems using PMU measurements), interference management techniques with transmitter/receiver cooperation, controlled and event-driven sensing for inference, and resource-efficient localization and tracking using sensor networks.

Yurii A Vlasov, Founder Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, 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. He has established two experimental labs: the first focused on integrated photonics for biomedical applications and the second dedicated to experimental systems neuroscience, reflecting the two directions of his current interest in applications of engineering solutions to life sciences.

Additionally, two ECE affiliates were also recognized among the six new named professorships.

Rohit Bhargava, Founder Professor in Bioengineering, is an ECE ILLINOIS affiliate. He also has appointments with chemical and biomolecular engineering, mechanical science and engineering, and chemistry. Bhargava is currently the director of the Cancer Community@Illinois, an organization hoping to advance cancer-related research and scholarship. It is a unique effort because it is the first national center combining engineering and oncology.

Rashid Bashir, recipient of the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, is an ECE ILLINOIS affiliate. He also has affiliate appointments with mechanical engineering and molecular and integrated physiology. His research focuses on bionanotechnology, BioMEMs, lab-on-a-chip, and other projects specifically for solving biomedical problems. Bashir has been granted 38 patents and has authored or co-authored more than 200 journal papers and 200 conference papers and conference abstracts.

Update: Professor Joseph Lyding's title in this story was updated on 10/9/2017.