Six faculty chosen as Willett Scholars

The College of Engineering has selected six faculty members--Tarek Abdelzaher, Patrick Chapman, Ioannis Chasiotis, Matthias Grosse-Perdekamp, William King, and Moonsub Shim--as Willett Faculty Scholars for four-year terms.

The purpose of the Willett Faculty Scholars is to increase the distinction of the college and its departments by recognizing and stimulating intellectual leadership and outstanding research.

An associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, Tarek Abdelzaher's interests lie primarily in systems, including operating systems, networking, sensor networks, distributed systems, and embedded real-time systems. He is especially interested in developing theory, architectural support, and computing abstractions for predictability in software systems, motivated by the increasing software complexity and the growing sources of non-determinism. Applications range from sensor networks to large-scale server farms, and from avionics to homeland defense.

In his research, Patrick Chapman, an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering, addresses a variety of problems in the areas of power and energy management. Broad topics of research include power electronics, solar power, wind power, solar home design, electric drives, electric machines, and power integrated circuits. His research group conducts both theoretical and experimental work, addressing power management from the range of milliwatts to kilowatts. The theoretical work usually focuses on modeling and optimization, as well as advanced simulation techniques for energy devices and systems. His is also co-founder and CTO of SmartSpark Energy Systems, Inc., and recently, served as an advisor for the U of I team's very successful Solar Decathlon entry.

This is the latest of many honors Ioannis Chasiotis has achieved since coming to Illinois. After starting his career at the University of Virginia, Chasiotis joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois in 2005. His research interests focus on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), nanostructured composite materials, mechanical behavior of nanofibers fabricated from polymers, ceramics and metals and the application of atomic force microscopy in experimental mechanics. Last week, Chasiotis traveled to Washington, D.C., where President Barack Obama will personally present the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award.

Physics associate professor Matthias Grosse-Perdekamp is a high-energy nuclear physics experimentalist who is a member of the PHENIX experiment at  at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The PHENIX collaboration, which includes 498 physicists and engineers from 70 institutions in 14 countries, engages in a broad program of studying QCD phenomena at RHIC, including the physics of heavy ion collisions, the spin-dependent structure of the proton in polarized proton-proton collisions, and the study of nucleon structure in a nuclear environment in proton- or deuteron-ion collisions. Grosse-Perdekamp joined the Department of Physics at Illinois as an assistant professor in 2002 remaining a Fellow at RIKEN through 2007.

William King is a Kritzer Faculty Scholar and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. Before coming to Illinois, King spent 16 months in the Micro/NanoMechanics Group of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and was on the faculty at Georgia Tech. At Illinois, his group works on nanoscale thermal and mechanical measurements, engineering of nanomechanical devices, nanomanufacturing, and nanometrology. King is the winner of the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the PECASE award from the Department of Energy, and the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research. He was named Young Manufacturing Engineer by the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (2006). In 2006, Technology Review Magazine named him to the TR35-one of the people under the age of 35 whose innovations are likely to change the world. He is co-founder of two companies and in 2007 his innovations were selected for an R&D 100 Award and a Micro/Nano 25 Award and in 2008 he won his second R&D 100 Award.

After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, Moonsub Shim joined the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Illinois in 2002. Now an associate professor, Shim's research revolves around low dimensional semiconductor materials from their synthesis to developing high performance components for electronics. Colloidal quantum dots and single-walled carbon nanotubes are studied as prototypical 0- and 1-dimensional systems. Several benefits are envisioned from such studies including an alternative route to molecular electronics where nanoscale components mediate and amplify responses of single molecules to high performance materials for nano and macroelectronics. Shim received an NSF CAREER Award in 2004.

The Willett Faculty Scholars honor the late Mr. Willett, who attended the University of Illinois from 1916-1922. He left the university six credits short of earning a BS from the Department of Civil Engineering. After leaving Urbana-Champaign, he joined his family’s Chicago-based coal business, Suburban Coal and Supply Company, as a partner. In the 1930s, Willett moved to Los Angeles, where he owned a bookkeeping and tax preparation business.

Willett died in 1981 at the age of 83. His wife, Elizabeth Marie Henning Willett, was a homemaker and managed the family savings; she was proud of the fact she was able to accumulate a fortune through her investment strategies. The couple had no children. According to Mrs. Willett, her late husband admired the College of Engineering for its thriftiness and honesty, and therefore, left a bequest in his memory upon her death in 1993. As stated in her will, the gift was, “for research, in memory of my beloved husband.”

Congratulations to these very deserving faculty members!

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