4/11/2017 Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office
Written by Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office
Professor Paul Scott Carney has been appointed Interim Director of the recently established Innovation, Leadership, and Engineering Entrepreneurship (ILEE) Program in the College of Engineering. The ILEE is a dual degree in the College of Engineering open to students who are also pursuing a disciplinary degree in the College, was approved in fall 2016.
“Professor Carney is uniquely qualified to lead ILEE and its curriculum committee to ensure a strong vibrant program that meets the needs of our students and the expectations of our faculty and alumni,” explained Andreas Cangellaris, dean of the College of Engineering. “We are fortunate to find someone with the breadth of experience needed to successfully launch this new and exciting program.”
An Illinois alumnus, Carney (BS 1994, Engineering Physics) earned his PhD in physics from the University of Rochester. He is a theorist with research interests in inverse problems, imaging, coherence theory and other branches of optical physics. His current interests include problems in inverse-scattering, classification, and spectroscopy.
As an Education Innovation Fellow at Illinois, Carney mentors projects within the College of Engineering initiated and run by other faculty to improve teaching. He also runs two such projects of his own, and serves as course director for the ECE 445 senior capstone course, a role he assumed in 2009. Upwards of 400 students will take the one-semester class this year, performing more than 150 distinct projects, some with industry partners, some with on-campus sponsors, some completely student-developed. His excellence in teaching and mentoring has been recognized by his students and the College of Engineering.
Carney has been involved with the Technology Entrepreneur Center in a variety of roles. He also a Faculty Entrepreneur Fellow in the College of Engineering, leading a class of students through the proof-of-concept exercise for the potential translation of one of his recent research discoveries into a commercially viable technology.
As an entrepreneur, Carney has brought the tools of inverse scattering to bear on optical coherence tomography innovations that have been spun-out into a successful medical imaging start-up. In 2008, Carney co-founded Diagnostic Photonics, and currently serves as its chief scientific officer and director of engineering.
The ILEE Program is currently overseen by ECE Professor Andrew Singer in his role is director of the Technology Entrepreneur Center. Singer was recently appointed as Interim Director of the Siebel Center for Design at Illinois.