Khetani, Patton receive named professorships, honored at investiture ceremony
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Two Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering Professors were recently honored by Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Karen Colley and former Dean Pete Nelson during an investiture ceremony this October.
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Salman Khetani was named a Robert Uyetani Collegiate Professor, and Professor James Patton was named a Richard and Loan Hill Professor. Patton also works as a senior research scientist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
Salman Khetani Heading link
Uyetani is an alumnus of the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spent his career in the aerospace industry as an electrical engineer and designed landing gear for F-16s, guidance systems and flight systems for Sidewinder missiles, and the systems for laser-guided missiles. Uyetani also worked with NASA on the Cassini probe to Saturn, the Magellan space probe, and some of the components used on the international space station.
Khetani holds Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering from Marquette University and MS and PhD degrees in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As a co-founder of Hepregen Corporation, Khetani led the development of engineered liver models for pharmaceutical drug testing, which are still used today. He began his academic career at Colorado State University and, in 2015, joined the University of Illinois Chicago, where he directs the Microfabricated Tissue Models Laboratory.
Khetani has received the NSF CAREER Award and multiple awards for his contributions to teaching, mentoring, and research. He has secured over $11 million in federal research funding, and his work has been cited nearly 7,000 times, earning him an h-index of 37. His research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Biotechnology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. He has also mentored nearly six dozen graduate and undergraduate students through research programs.
James Patton Heading link
The Hills have been generous supporters of the UIC Colleges of Engineering and Medicine for years, giving the University $10 million. Rick is a 1974 UIC bioengineering graduate and a 1981 MBA graduate from Syracuse. In 2008, Rick was the first recipient of an honorary UIC Doctorate of Engineering degree.
Formerly chairman and CEO of Novellus Systems—a leader in the design and manufacture of semiconductor equipment used to fabricate integrated circuits that were sold to Lam Research for $3.3 billion in 2012—Rick has deep experience in all aspects of the semiconductor industry, as well as in corporate governance. Before joining Novellus in 1993, Rick Hill spent 12 years in senior leadership roles at Tektronix. Before Tektronix, he held a range of engineering and management positions with General Electric, Motorola, and Hughes Aircraft.
Loan Hill is a Vietnamese refugee. In April of 1975, Loan Tran was airlifted from Tan Son Nhut Airbase in Saigon under harrowing circumstances with five of her siblings and a young niece and nephew. She earned her degree in computer science from San Jose State University. She has worked for several high-tech start-ups where she succeeded and eventually landed at Novellus Systems in 1990, where she rose to be CIO.
Patton received his Bachelor of Science degrees in mechanical engineering and engineering science from the University of Michigan (1989), MS in theoretical mechanics from Michigan State University (1993), and PhD in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University (1998).
Patton’s groundbreaking research to improve rehabilitation strategies has been cited by his peers in the technical literature more than 8,000 times, with an H-index of 43. He has also garnered prestigious NIH and NIDDR grants to support his research over many years at both UIC and Shirley Ryan.
He worked in automotive manufacturing and nuclear medicine before discovering control of human movement. His interests include robotic teaching, controls, haptics, modeling, human-machine interfaces, and technology-facilitated recovery from a brain injury. Patton is vice president of conferences for the IEEE-EMB society, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and IEEE Transactions Medical Robotics and Bionics.