CSL faculty lead the way in many industries for research and innovation. Recently, the Grainger College of Engineering recognized a number of our faculty for their contributions through the honor of endowed chairs, professorships, and promotions.
“It is truly exciting to see many of the senior CSL faculty receiving the recognition of their impactful work through the various chairs and professorships,” said Klara Nahrstedt, CSL director. “Furthermore, I am confident that the recognition and with it associated endowment funding will contribute to broader intellectual life in the Coordinated Science Laboratory.”
Promotions are part of the academic cycle and it is especially rewarding for me to see the promotions from assistant to associate professors and from associate to full professors of CSL faculty, and know that our Coordinated Science Laboratory research environment contributed to their successful research, education and service activities.
Chair
David Nicol, Herman Dieckamp Chair of Engineering
Nicol has served as director of the Information Trust Institute since 2011. He is the principal investigator for the Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (CREDC) and principal investigator/director for the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute. His research focuses on problems related to creating and accurately coordinating representation of critical infrastructure systems which include analytic and simulation models of the physical structures, and how these representations are affected by models of the sensors, control devices, and communication infrastructure.
The Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in Engineering was made possible by the generous support of Herman Dieckamp.
Professorships
In addition to CSL and ECE, Do has appointments with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Department of Bioengineering, and the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include signal processing, computational imaging, machine perception, and data science.
The Thomas and Margaret Huang Endowed Professorship in Signal Processing and Data Science was established by late CSL professor Thomas Huang before his passing in April 2020.
Olgica Milenkovic, Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Milenkovic's research focuses on several areas including DNA storage, bioinformatics, compressive sensing, low rank matrix completion, community detection, hypergraph clustering, and ordinal data processing. She was among the first researchers to get involved in the emerging field of DNA-based storage system design.
The Franklin W. Woeltge Professorships were established thanks to a $4 million gift from Franklin Woeltge.
Viswanath has a long history of research excellence in wireless communications. His work has focused on algorithms for wireless calling, MIMO algorithms, and interference management, providing not only vast theoretical and conceptual contributions but practical solutions. He was one of the early designers of Flash-OFDM, a technology used in a broad variety of wireless solutions.
The Gilmore Family Endowed Professorship was established by Merle L. and Lisa M. Gilmore.
Daniel Liberzon, Richard T. Cheng Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Liberzon’s research interests include nonlinear control theory, switched and hybrid dynamical systems, control with limited information, and uncertain and stochastic systems. He has written multiple books and is a fellow of IEEE and IFAC, and an Editor for Automatica (Nonlinear Systems and Control area).
ECE Alum Richard T. Cheng established this professorship to help Illinois ECE retain and attract talented faculty.
Promotions
CSL wishes the most sincere congratulations to our faculty receiving promotions this academic year.
- Michael Bailey to Professor in ECE
- Rakesh Kumar to Professor in ECE
- Cedric Langbort to Professor in Aerospace Engineering
- Prashant Mehta to Professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering
- Girish Chowdhary to Associate Professor in Agricultural and Biological Engineering
- Lav Varshney to Associate Professor in ECE
- Georgios Fellouris to Associate Professor in Statistics