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UIC Distinguished Professor Award

Learn more about the UIC Distinguished Professorship.

Announcing 2023-24 UIC Distinguished Professors Heading link

The UIC Distinguished Professorship was created to recruit and recognize persons who have made a significant impact upon their field through scholarship, creativity, and leadership.

Sanjib Basu

Sanjib Basu

Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
School of Public Health

Sanjib Basu is the Paul Levy and Virginia F. Tomasek Professor of Biostatistics in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UIC School of Public Health. He is the Principal Investigator and co-lead of the Population Health Analytics, Metrics and Evaluation (PHAME) center at UIC whose mission is to democratize data for population health. Dr. Basu is the Associate Director of the Section of Biostatistics and the Director of the Center for Biostatistical Development. Dr. Basu graduated with a PhD in Statistics from Purdue University and previously served as a Presidential Research Professor and Director of the Division of Statistics at Northern Illinois University. He is currently an Editor of a reputed Statistics journal and also serving in the Editorial boards of multiple Statistics journals. Dr. Basu’s research spans Biostatistical methodology, Bayesian modeling and inference, and scientific research in Public Health, Cancer, and diverse areas in health sciences.

Ana Bedran-Russo

Ana Bedran-Russo

Department of Oral Biology
College of Dentistry

Dr. Bedran-Russo is a clinician-scientist that is highly recognized in the field of dental biomaterials. She has extensively published in the areas of structural, mechanical and compositional studies of dentin and interfaces between dental tissues and dental biomaterials. She pioneered the use of bioinspired strategies to mimic native reinforcement mechanisms various hierarchical levels of the extracellular matrix organization and mediate the biomechanics and biostability of dentin. Among these strategies, her group is well-known for exploiting nature-derived oligomeric proanthocyanidins as interventional biomaterials, that have gained attention beyond the field of dentistry.

Sudip Mazumder

Sudip Mazumder

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
College of Engineering

Dr. Mazumder received his Ph.D. degree from Virginia Tech in 2001. Since 2001, he has served as a Professor at UIC and the Director of LESES. He also serves as the President of NextWatt LLC since 2008. He has over 30 years of professional experience encompassing academia and leading industries having carried out close to 60 sponsored . He is a Fellow of IEEE (2016), AAAS (2020), and AAIA (2022) for distinguished contributions in power electronics. He is the current Editor-at-Large for IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, the leading journal in power electronics. He received several IEEE awards/honors including the 2023 IEEE Power & Energy Society’s Ramakumar Family Renewable Energy Excellence Award, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Prize Paper Awards (2022, 2002) and Highlighted Papers (2023, 2022, 2018), Featured Article for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2023), IEEE Conference Best Paper Award (2013), IEEE Outstanding Paper Award (2007), and IEEE International Future Energy Challenge Award (2005).

Gail Prins

Gail Prins

Department of Urology
College of Medicine

Gail S. Prins, PhD is the Michael Reese Professor of Urology and Physiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and the Co‐Director of the Chicago Center for Health and Environment (CACHET, an NIEHS P30 Core Center) in the UIC School of Public Health. She is the Director of the University Andrology Laboratory at UIC and has been active in translational and clinical male reproductive research and activities for 40 years. Her basic research focuses on prostate carcinogenesis, estrogen actions in the prostate gland including the influence of early life exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals and toxins on adult prostate cancer risk. Her work established that early life exposures to natural estrogens or EDCs (bisphenol A, arsenic, PFAS) permanently reprogram the prostate and increase its susceptibility to cancer with aging. She has over 200 publications and currently is Principal Investigator on 2 NIH grants and 2 DoD awards.

Mark I. Rosenblatt

Mark I. Rosenblatt

Administration
College of Medicine

Mark I. Rosenblatt, MD, PhD, MBA, MHA has been the Executive Dean of the University of Illinois College of Medicine since 2019. Dr. Rosenblatt is an internationally recognized clinician-scientist. As Director of the Corneal Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, he leads groups of scientists investigating the mechanism of corneal peripheral nerve regeneration following injury, and the use of nanoengineered biomaterials for use in stem cell delivery to the ocular surface. His work in regenerative medicine has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, Research to Prevent Blindness, the Falk Family Foundation, and the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative. Dr. Rosenblatt has published widely, including over 150 original manuscripts, review articles, book chapters, and abstracts.

Nik Theodore

Nik Theodore

Department of Urban Planning and Policy
College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs

Nik Theodore is a Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, as well as the Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development.

María de los Angeles Torres

María de los Angeles Torres

Department of Latin American and Latino Studies
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

María de los Angeles Torres is distinguished university professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written extensively on Latinos, Cuba and Cuban exiles’ politics and identity, immigration, and culture. She was director of the UIC Latin American and Latino Studies Program and of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. She is presently working on two programs funded by the Mellon Foundation that support graduate students in Latino Humanities. She is on the editorial boards of the academic journals Latino Oral Histories and Dialogo. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who has also contributed to art history projects including compiling a virtual collection of One Hundred Years of Chicago Latino Art and Chicago Latino Virtual Gallery. She is presently serving as dramaturge to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. She is a frequent media commentator on US/Cuba relations and immigration.

Past UIC Distinguished Professor Award Recipients Heading link