Endowed Professorships

This year, three faculty received the James P. Hartnett Professorship in Energy Engineering: Professor Kenneth Brezinsky, Distinguished Professor Constantine Megaridis, and Professor Reza Shahbazian-Yassar, all of mechanical and industrial engineering.

James P. Hartnett was a professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at UIC, and served as founding director of the university’s Energy Resources Center. He was also a founding editor of the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. Hartnett passed away in 2021.

The Richard and Loan Hill Professorship of Engineering was awarded to Professor Natasha Devroye of the electrical and computer engineering department, biomedical engineering Professor James Patton, and Distinguished Professor Alexander Yarin from the mechanical and industrial engineering department.

These positions are sponsored by Richard Hill (BS ’74) and Loan Hill. Rick Hill graduated from UIC with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering. He has held engineering and management positions at several companies, and in 1993, he became CEO of Novellus Systems, then a small semiconductor manufacturing equipment company in Silicon Valley, which he led to become one of the top semiconductor equipment manufacturers in the world. Hill retired in 2012 after selling Novellus to Lam Research for $3.3 billion. The Hills have donated more than $9 million to the university over the last few decades.

Professor Cornelia Caragea is the inaugural recipient of the newly-established Robert V. Kenyon Professorship, the first endowed named professorship that is exclusively bestowed to a professor in the computer science department.

The professorship is supported by computer science Professor Emeritus Robert V. Kenyon and his spouse, Cynthia A. Vahlkamp. Robert “Bob” Kenyon has a track record of groundbreaking professional contributions at UIC, where he has been a tenured professor since 1986.

Professors Barbara Di Eugenio and Michael Papka are the first recipients of the Warren S. McCulloch Professorship in Computer Science. Their appointments run for seven years.

Warren McCulloch, a neurophysiologist and cybernetician, was a professor of psychiatry at UIC for about a decade in the 1940s. Together with Walter Pitts, a logician, McCulloch published a groundbreaking paper that proposed a simplified mathematical model of a biological neuron. This model, known as the McCulloch-Pitts neuron, is the basis for deep learning networks. This professorship is funded directly by the computer science department.

Distinguished Professor Bing Liu received the Peter and Deborah Wexler Professorship in Computing this fall.

Alumnus Peter Wexler (MS ’81) is the co-founder of SpiderCloud Wireless, Inc., and a member of UIC’s College of Engineering Advisory board. He and his wife fund this, and a Wexler Chair in IT position in the college.

Chemical engineering Professor and Department Head Vikas Berry and Professor and College of Engineering Interim Associate Dean of Research Ying Liu were recently recognized as the first two appointments as a Dr. Satish C. Saxena and Asha Saxena Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Professor Saxena joined UIC in 1968 as a professor , later serving as head of the engineering department. During his lifetime, he published five books and more than 532 papers. He mentored and supervised countless postdocs, PhD, and MS students, and taught thousands of other students. His groundbreaking work led to the revolutionizing of several multiphase catalytic reactors that are still operational in the chemical industry. The Mason-Saxena equation is used across the world to determine the thermal conductivity of gas mixtures.

Two other faculty, Farhad Ansari and Philip Yu, were reappointed to their current professorships. Ansari is a distinguished professor and the Christopher B. and Susan S. Burke Professor of Civil Engineering. Distinguished Professor Yu is the Wexler Chair in IT.

Ansari’s award is thanks to Christopher B. Burke and his wife Susan. Burke is a practicing civil engineer who specializes in water resources, and municipal engineering focusing on the Midwest. He is a member of the College’s Advisory Board, and has taught water resources- related courses at UIC since 2001. His firm Christopher B. Burke Engineering includes a staff of about 250 located in Rosemont, Illinois and Indiana.

Yu’s professorship is a result of a $2 million gift from alumnus Peter Wexler in 2006, then the largest cash gift in the university’s history, to recruit a senior scholar in information technology. The Peter and Deborah Wexler Chair in Information Technology is the UIC’s first endowed chair.

UIC Engineering seeks to establish new endowed faculty chair and professorship positions to help attract and retain scholars. By providing funding to endow a faculty position, donors create a lasting opportunity to recognize great talent and attract students, industry leaders, and research organizations.