Minerick named Head of Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering

Professor Adrienne Minerick has been appointed the new head of the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering, effective September 16.

Minerick arrives at UIC after 16 years at Michigan Technological University, where she was a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering with an affiliated appointment in biomedical engineering.

As department head, Minerick hopes to expand collaborations, educational and research efforts, and developmental opportunities for students.

“There’s so much that the current faculty are already doing, and UIC is just uniquely positioned to really grow that even further, so I’m excited to explore what’s possible and enhance team science,” she said.

Minerick earned her PhD and MS in chemical & biomolecular engineering from the University of Notre Dame, and her BS in chemical engineering from Michigan Technological University.

She brings a strong history of honors and recognition in engineering. She served as president of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) from 2021 to 2022 and was inducted into the ASEE Hall of Fame in 2023. She is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows in April 2026, an honor reserved for the top two percent of medical and biological engineers nationally. She has also received the AES Lifetime Achievement Award and an NSF CAREER Award early in her career.

Minerick also brings her many leadership experiences to UIC, including her time as the MTU College of Engineering associate dean for research and innovation, the MTU School of Technology dean, founding dean of the MTU College of Computing, and as interim dean of MTU Pavlis Honors College during an institutional reorganization.

As head, Minerick hopes to strengthen the department’s ties across both the College of Medicine and to other departments within the College of Engineering.

“I’m excited to learn in greater detail about everyone’s research,” Minerick said. “It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle—fitting the pieces together and seeing how they’re related and what opportunities exist to further advance knowledge in biomedical engineering.”

Her own research focuses on electrokinetics, using electrical fields to investigate live cells, including recent projects on the gut microbiome and Caco-2 intestinal lining cells, as well as a novel Vitamin D electrochemical biosensor. Electrokinetics applies electric fields to manipulate fluids, cells, proteins, and DNA inside microscale devices. Minerick uses electric fields to conduct medically critical measurements including vitamins in tears, hematocrit (red blood cell concentration), stem cell purification, viral infection cycle stages, small-scale protein separations for hemoglobinopathies, and ABO-Rh blood typing.

Growing research collaborations and developing research centers that focus on cross-cutting areas, like the intersection of biomedical engineering with artificial intelligence and quantum technologies, is key, she says.

“Leveraging AI is not limited to research,” she said. “I think there are opportunities for innovations in BME education as well. An analogy for AI’s growing utilization in engineering is related to when the calculator came out, the standard at that time was a slide rule.”

During this transition, she says, there was resistance: many thought that a calculation couldn’t be rigorously understood if it was done with a calculator, because there was no physical evidence of the calculations.

“Simultaneously, we have a challenge that a lot of these AI tools have gotten to the point where the need to generate your own code no longer exists,” Minerick said. “But students need to know how to prompt and direct a large language model, to test the code to make sure that it is functioning properly, and to assess the output to ensure it is correct in context.”

The challenge in academia, she says, is teaching foundational skills that can be built upon and showing students how those skills relate to career pathways into different fields.

“There’s a lot of curricular opportunities building from the strong foundations that are already at UIC and BME and the existing concentrations within the major,” she said.

Minerick’s passion is mentoring graduate students. She remains in touch with many of her former students: five have become faculty, two have earned their own NSF CAREER Awards, and one received an NIH K-award.

In fact, Minerick’s own experiences with one of her mentors, Rich Felder, taught her that the education component of her career plan needs to be as scholarly as the research portion.

Minerick took this advice to heart, which led to her involvement with the American Society for Engineering Education. Her love of teaching and mentoring is apparent in everything she does.

“I’ve always worked for the students,” she said.

Keeping this in mind, with every opportunity Minerick approaches, she always asks herself two key questions: “Can I make the institution and the world, a better place? And could I really make a difference—leaving it better than how I found or received it?”

Minerick is driven through her passion not only of mentoring but helping position every student for success and equipping them with the resilience and navigational tools needed to navigate their educational careers and simultaneously juggle the other dimensions of life that make each of them unique assets to the world.