Faculty Development

Faculty Early Career Development Workshop Heading link

To foster the early-career success of UIC faculty, the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and Science collaborated to create the Faculty Early Career Development Workshop. Central to this workshop is a recognition that new faculty can benefit from support in teaching strategies, a deeper understanding of the value of service to the university and the field, and, in particular, the development of a research agenda.

The workshop is formatted as an interactive panel with UIC faculty leaders who have navigated this landscape and achieved success, particularly in research. The panel addresses topics such as:

  • How to identify and prioritize key research themes
  • Funding paths in the initial years
  • Advising student researchers
  • Working with colleagues and external collaborators
  • Challenges of interdisciplinary research
  • Time and stress management skills

The sections below showcase the panelists who have presented at this workshop in recent years. UIC users also may download the presenters’ slides by clicking on their names.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Panelists:

Luke Hanley is a Distinguished Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and has been at UIC since 1990. He received his BSc and specialist degrees in chemistry from the University of Toronto, his PhD in physical chemistry from SUNY Stony Brook, and served his NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. He was NSF Young Investigator in chemistry from 1994 to 1998 and also a UI Scholar during this period. He was a UIC Researcher of the Year and became a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society in 2009. Finally, he spent 2017-2018 as an NSF Program Officer. His nearly 140 refereed papers cover a diverse array of topics including laser desorption, laser photoionization, surface science, mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry, bioengineering, and microbiology. His work has been funded by NSF, NIH, NASA, DOD, and DOE.

Neal Mankad is an associate professor of chemistry at UIC. He started his independent career at UIC in 2012 after training at MIT (BS), Caltech (PhD), and UC-Berkeley (postdoc). His research group studies synthetic organometallic chemistry in the context of metalloenzymes, catalysts for organic transformations, and energy conversion and storage. These projects are funded externally by NSF and NIH. Mankad has received awards for both research and teaching, including by the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the UIC Rising Star Researcher of the Year, the UIC Teaching Recognition Program, and the student-nominated UIC Honoring Our Professors’ Excellence (HOPE) awards.

Elisabeta (Liz) Marai is an associate professor of computer science at UIC. Her research focuses on visual computing, an area of computer science that handles images, 3D models, and the interaction between humans and data that can be represented visually. Her research interests go from visual-system related problems that can be robustly solved through automation to problems that require human experts in the computational loop, and the principles behind this work. Marai’s research has been recognized by multiple prestigious awards, including outstanding paper awards, along with her students; an NSF CAREER Award; multiple NSF awards; and multi-site NIH R01 awards, including an Early Investigator award. She has received multiple teaching awards for courses that blend teaching and research. She has co-authored scientific open-source software adopted by thousands of users, and she is a patent co-author.

Reza Shahbazian-Yassar is a professor of mechanical and materials engineering at UIC. He received his PhD in materials science from Washington State University in Pullman and served for seven years at Michigan Tech as chair associate professor of nanotechnology. He has published more than 160 papers in journals such as Science, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Energy, Nature Communications, Advanced Energy Materials, and Nano Letters. He was the president for Midwest Microscopy Society, a member of steering committee for ASME NanoEngineering for Energy Committee, and the former chair of the Advanced Characterization, Testing, and Simulation Committee at The Materials Society. He is also on the editorial board for Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A. His work has been funded by NSF, DOE, Argonne National Laboratory, and various private sectors.

Video recording of workshop.

Friday, September 28, 2019

Panelists:

David Eddington is a full professor of bioengineering at UIC. His research lab focuses on developing novel solutions to current unmet experimental and clinical needs through applying simple microfluidic devices. These devices leverage beneficial phenomena (e.g. process integration, fast diffusion, or high surface to volume ratio) over multiple scales (e.g. nano, micro, and meso) to effectively leverage the power of scale without becoming overly complex. Eddington received a BS in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he did a postdoc in the Health Sciences and Technology program at MIT before starting at UIC in 2006.

Ksenija Glusac is an associate professor of chemistry at UIC. She started her independent research career at Bowling Green State University in 2006, where she was also a member of the Center for Photochemical Sciences. In 2017, she took a joint position as an associate professor at UIC and a principal scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. The Glusac group studies metal-free catalysis relevant to the energy storage and solar fuel applications. These projects are funded by NSF and ACS-PRF. Dr. Glusac’s research has been acknowledged by the following awards: (i) BGSU Outstanding Young Scholar Award, 2012; (ii) NSF CAREER Award, 2011-2016; (iii) ACS PRF Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2004-2006; (iv) Jones Award for Creativity and Originality, 2002. She received her PhD from the University of Florida in 2004.

Robert Klie is a full professor of physics at UIC. His research focuses on atomic-scale characterization of energy materials as well as developing new in-situ characterization methods to study structural and electronic phase transitions in complex oxide materials using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). He has published more than 160 peer-reviewed papers with more than 4,400 citations, given more than 75 invited talks at prestigious international conferences, and has an h-index of 33. Klie’s scientific achievements have been recognized by a number of prestigious awards, including the Brookhaven Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, and the University of Illinois Researcher of the Year award.

Didem Ozevin is an associate professor of civil and materials engineering at UIC. Before this appointment, she worked as a research scientist at Physical Acoustics Corporation over four years, gaining expertise in many nondestructive evaluation methods such as acoustic emission, ultrasonics, and eddy currents. Her current research includes periodic structure design, quantitative understanding of the acoustic emission method, numerical modeling of the elastic wave problem, nonlinear ultrasonics for stress measurement at thick plates, MEMS sensors for multi-sensor fusion capability, and crack detection in rotating machinery. Her research has been supported by NSF, NCHRP, DOD, and NAVAIR. She is a recipient of the ASNT Faculty Award in 2014 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2016. She is a member of ASCE, ISHMII and ACI. Dr. Ozevin received her PhD from Lehigh University in 2005.