Four Engineering Faculty named Willett Professors

Four Illinois Engineering professors were among those named Donald Biggar Willett Professors. This recognition is targeted for faculty members who are excelling in their contributions to the University of Illinois, in addition to excellence in research, teaching, and professional service. On a broader scale, the Willett Research Initiatives in Engineering funds professorships, undergraduate and graduate student research, and related research activity. It honors the memory of Donald Biggar Willett (1897-1981) who attended the University of Illinois from 1916-1921. 

The designees are:

Waltraud Kriven, Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Professsor Kriven is a well-established international leader in the materials science and engineering of geopolymers and geopolymer composites and in the design of advanced materials, ceramics, and multi-phase composites. Her work on high-temperature, synchrotron-based studies of ceramics have been continuously funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for 33 years and by the National Science Foundation for 20 years, and her work has been highly cited. She has led a half dozen industry-funded programs, and her start-up company, Keanetech, LLC, was recently awarded a Stage I SBIR grant from the U.S. Army through the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. 

Professor Kriven has been a member of our faculty since 1984. A Fellow of both the American and Australian Ceramic Societies, she was named an Academician of the World Academy of Ceramics in 2004 and earned the Mueller Award for Research in Ceramic Engineering from the Engineering Division of the American Ceramic Society in 2017. 

John Lambros, Department of Aerospace Engineering. Professor Lambros is considered one of the world’s finest experimentalists in solid mechanics, with emphasis on the development and application of advanced experimental techniques to understand the impact and failure response of complex materials. 

A member of the faculty since 2000, Professor Lambros directs the state-of-the-art Advanced Materials Testing and Evaluations Laboratory (AMTEL) on campus. It is considered one of the premier experimental facilities in the high-strain-rate impact testing of advanced materials.

In 2017, the Society for Experimental Mechanics bestowed Professor Lambros with both the P.S. Theocaris Award for outstanding research in mechanics and the Hetenyi Award for Best Paper in Experimental Mechanics. 

A Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, the Society for Experimental Mechanics and the American Academy of Mechanics, Professor Lambros has been a leader on several multi-university research initiatives. He has been a valuable leader on this campus as well, which includes overseeing a significant rise in the AE graduate student population under his watch as Associate Head for Graduate Studies within the department during 2011-2016.

Alexander Vakakis, Mechanical Science and Engineering. Professor Vakakis is internationally recognized for his contributions to nonlinear dynamics. His work has been sponsored by the likes of DARPA, the Hyundai Motor Company, the National Science Foundation, and the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. 

In the past five years, Professor Vakakis has placed more the 40 graduate students in academic and research positions around the world and has published more the 100 journal articles and nearly 100 conference papers with students and collaborators of the Linear and Nonlinear Dynamics and Vibrations Laboratory. A Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in 2014 he was recognized with the ASME Thomas K. Caughey Award for significant contributions in the field of nonlinear dynamics. 

A member of the faculty since 1999, he has played a significant role within the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, serving on the MechSE Faculty Promotions Committee, the MechSE Named Faculty Appointments Committee, and the College of Engineering Growth Task Force. He was named to the list of excellent teachers seven times in the past five years with two “outstanding” ratings. 

ChengXiang Zhai, Department of Computer Science. An affiliate with the Carl. R. Woese Institute of Genomic Biology, Professor Zhai is an internationally recognized leader in the field of information retrieval (IR) and text data mining. He developed the foundations for using a new family of statistical language models for IR and several language models that directly contributed to the prevalent adoption of language models for IR in search engines. 

Professor Zhai has also made significant contributions to text data mining, developing novel probabilistic models for discovering topics in association with geographic information, sentiment rating information, and hierarchical ontology structures. He is ranked third in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) community by publication counts, and his Google Scholar Profile has more than 25,000 citations.

A member of the University of Illinois faculty since 2002, Professor Zhai earned the Campus Award for Graduate Student Mentoring in 2016 and was named an ACM Fellow in 2017. In 2016 he was one of two individuals to have papers earn the ACM SIGIR Pre-Test of Time Award.