Three engineering faculty members named to Center for Advanced Study

The Center for Advanced Study (CAS) has announced nine new appointments to its permanent faculty – one of the highest honors the University of Illinois campus bestows for outstanding scholarship. Three of this year's appointees are from the College of Engineering.

The new CAS professors are James D. Anderson, education policy, organization and leadership; Nigel Goldenfeld, physics; Stephen Long, plant biology; Tere O’Connor, dance; John Rogers, materials science and engineering; Jay Rosenstein, journalism; Klaus Schulten, physics; Jonathan Sweedler, chemistry; and Maria Todorova, history.

They join 18 other CAS professors, drawn from academic departments across the campus, and will continue to serve as full members of their home departments while shaping the future of CAS by selecting associates and fellows for the center. They each receive a research fund of $5,000 per year. Their appointments are permanent, and were approved by the U. of I. Board of Trustees during its July meeting.

Nigel Goldenfeld

Goldenfeld is a Swanlund Professor in the Department of Physics and leads the Biocomplexity Theme at the Institute for Genomic Biology. He is also the director of the Institute for Universal Biology, part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute network. His research encompasses physics, microbial ecology, evolutionary biology, fluid mechanics, materials science and quantitative finance, with a unifying focus on the evolution of patterns over time, such as the growth of snowflakes, the microstructures of materials, the flow of fluids and spatial organization of ecosystems. He also is the author of a popular graduate textbook on statistical mechanics.

John Rogers

Rogers is a Swanlund Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory. He is well-known for his pioneering work on merging hard and soft materials into unusual electronic systems, with an emphasis on bio-integrated devices and bio-inspired design. Recent examples include injectable, cellular-scale optoelectronics, “insect eye” digital imagers, and biodegradable circuits.

Klaus Schulten

Schulten, a Swanlund Professor of Physics, heads the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and he co-directs the Center for the Physics of Living Cells in the physics department. He was the first to demonstrate that parallel computers can be employed to solve the many-body problem in biomolecular modeling and the first to accomplish a simulation of an entire life form (the satellite tobacco mosaic virus). His group recently discovered the molecular structure of the HIV capsid, offering far-reaching implications for HIV pharmaceutical interventions, and his group’s software for molecular graphics and modeling is used by thousands of researchers worldwide.