Kesavadas appointed first director of Illinois' Health Care Engineering Systems Center

Thenkurussi (Kesh) Kesavadas has been named the first director of the new Health Care Engineering Systems Center at Illinois. Through the center, which will be housed in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the College of Engineering has partnered with the Jump Simulation and Education Center (Jump) of the OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, in an initiative known as Applied Research for Community Health through Engineering and Simulation (Jump ARCHES). The aim is to develop new technologies and cyber-physical systems, to advance medical simulation and training, and to drive a transformation in the practice and quality of health care, in the future.

Kesavadas earned his Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and he is co-founder of Simulated Surgical Systems LLC, which launched world’s first comprehensive virtual reality robotic surgery simulator to train surgeons to operate the da Vinci™ surgical robot. As director, he will lead the development of the new center and its research program. He also will serve as “Engineer in Chief” of the Jump ARCHES collaborative partnership between Engineering at Illinois and OSF HealthCare and the University of Illinois’ College of Medicine at Peoria.

Since 1996, he has been a faculty member at the University at Buffalo where he founded the UB Virtual Reality Laboratory. As a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, he has pursued research in medical robotics and simulation, virtual reality in design, and haptics and human-computer interaction.

In addition to his director role at the Health Care Engineering Systems Center, Kesh has a faculty appointment as professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering.