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Dr. Marcia Pool is a Lecturer in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her career, Marcia has been active in improving undergraduate education through developing problem-based laboratories to enhance experimental design skills; developing a preliminary design course focused on problem identification and market space (based on an industry partner’s protocol); and mentoring and guiding student teams through the senior design capstone course and a translational course following senior design. To promote biomedical/bioengineering, Marcia works with Women in Engineering to offer outreach activities and is engaged at the national level as Executive Director of the biomedical engineering honor society, Alpha Eta Mu Beta.

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Rohit Bhargava is Bliss Faculty Scholar of Engineering and Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a faculty member with affiliations in several departments across campus (Primary – Bioengineering: Affiliated - Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Science and Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry) as well as the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Rohit received dual B.Tech. degrees (in Chemical Engineering and Polymer Science and Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1996 and his doctoral thesis work at Case Western Reserve University (Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering) was in the area of polymer spectroscopy. He then worked as a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (2000-2005) in the area of biomedical vibrational spectroscopy. Rohit has been at Illinois since as Assistant Professor (2005-2011), Associate Professor (2011-2012) and Professor (2012-). Rohit was the first assistant professor hired into the new Bioengineering department and played a key role in the development of its curriculum and activities. He later founded and serves as the coordinator of the Cancer Community@Illinois, a group dedicated to advancing cancer-related research and scholarship on campus. Research in the Bhargava laboratories focuses on fundamental theory and simulation for vibrational spectroscopic imaging, developing new instrumentation and developing chemical imaging for molecular pathology. Using 3D printing and engineered tumor models, recent research seeks to elucidate hetero-cellular interactions in cancer progression. Rohit’s work has been recognized with several research awards nationally. Among recent honors are the Meggers Award (Society for applied spectroscopy, 2014), Craver Award (Coblentz Society, 2013) and the FACSS Innovation Award (2012). Rohit has also been recognized for his dedication to teaching in the College of Engineering (Rose and Everitt awards) and he is routinely nominated to the list of teachers ranked excellent at Illinois.

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P. Scott Carney is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois where he has been since 2001. His group website may be found at http://optics.beckman.illinois.edu. Carney teaches the ECE senior capstone course and a rotation of three advanced graduate courses in optics. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester (1999) and was a post-doc at Washington University (1999-2001). He is a theorist with research interests in inverse problems, imaging, coherence theory, and other branches of optical physics. Carney is the co-organizer and creator of the Saturday Engineering for Everyone lectures, a popular lecture series for all ages at the University of Illinois. He is an Education Innovation Fellow in the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education.

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Prof Dipanjan Pan is presently an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and the Director for M.Eng in Bioinstrumentation Program at the College of Engineering.He is also a full-time faculty member at the Beckman Institute, an affiliate in the Materials Science and Engineering department and faculty with the Institute in Sustainability in Energy and Environment (iSEE). He is a full member of UIC cancer center and also an affiliate of Carle Cancer Center. Prior to coming to Illinois in 2013, he was an Assistant Professor at the Washington University School of Medicine.
His primary area of work is application of nanotechnology in bio-medicine in a broadly defined sense, emphasizing translatable materials development. His group uniquely merge drug discovery, drug re-purposing and materials science with biomedical imaging modalities for translational and pre-clinical application. The other area of his research interest is sustainability through bioengineering. His research has been externally funded through NIH (R01), NSF, American Heart Association, Children’s Discovery Institute, Michael Reese Foundation and other agencies. In close collaboration with clinicians he was successful in translating his work for commercial application (Ocean Nanotech, and others). He is the founder/co-founder of three University Start-ups- Vitruvian Biotech, KaloCyte, Inc. and InnSight, Inc.
He is an elected fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (UK). He is an editorial board member of Scientific Report (Nature Publishing) and also serve as in editorial advisory board member for Molecular Pharmaceutics (ACS).

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Andrew M. Smith, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Dr. Smith received a B.S. in Chemistry in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 2008, both from the Georgia Institute of Technology. As a graduate student he was a Whitaker Foundation Fellow. He continued his postdoctoral studies at Emory University as a Distinguished CCNE Fellow and NIH K99 Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Smith's research interests include nanomaterial engineering, single-molecule imaging, and cancer biology. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Bioengineering.

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