Four Engineering at Illinois faculty named CAS Fellows

Four Engineering at Illinois faculty members have been appointed fellows in the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) for the 2012/13 academic year. 

The fellows are selected by the permanent faculty of the CAS in an annual competition. According to CAS director Leon Dash, "The Center for Advanced Study (CAS) supports the extraordinary human and physical resources of the University of Illinois by encouraging and promoting exemplary scholarship in all areas of knowledge. One of the primary missions of the Center is to identify the very best scholars at the University." The fellows are provided with one semester's teaching release to pursue groundbreaking research activities.

The Department of Physics has two CAS fellows for 2012/13, Yann R. Chemla and Mark S. Neubauer. During his fellowship appointment, Chemla will exploit the capabilities of a unique instrument that he developed, which combines high-resolution optical trapping with single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, to study the molecular "nanomachines" involved in genome maintenance.

Neubauer will use his fellowship appointment to launch a new computing facility at the University of Illinois to process and analyze the massive datasets obtained by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.  He will also work on detector commissioning and development of a fast hardware tracker (FTK) for ATLAS.

Hyunjoon Kong, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Gabriel Popescu, electrical and computer engineering (ECE), are also new fellows. Kong, with ECE professor Rashid Bashir, has developed a bandage that stimulates and directs blood vessel growth on the surface of a wound. The bandage, called a “microvascular stamp,” contains living cells that deliver growth factors to damaged tissues in a defined pattern. Propescu's research team has developed a new imaging method called spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM) that can measure cell mass using two beams of light, offering new insight into the much-debated problem of whether cells grow at a constant rate or exponentially.

Olgica Milenkovic (ECE) and Sheng Zhong, bioengineering are new CAS Associates. CAS Associates are tenured University of Illinois faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project.
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If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, writer/editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.