Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce Professor Rashid Bashir as dean of the College of Engineering, effective November 1, 2018, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Professor Bashir currently serves as the Executive Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and holds the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering.

Professor Bashir joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007 as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. His research interests include bio-nanotechnology, BioMEMs, lab on a chip, interfacing of biology and engineering from the molecular to the tissue scale, and applications of semiconductor fabrication to biomedical engineering, all applied to solving biomedical problems. Prior to his current appointment, he held a number of key administrative positions, including serving as the director of the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and head of the Department of Bioengineering. Professor Bashir played an integral role in the conceptual development and planning of the engineering-based Carle Illinois College of Medicine in 2015. He co-led the formation of the ongoing campus-wide Mayo Clinic and Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare with the Mayo Clinic around individualized medicine, cancer, and computational genomics. He was also instrumental in guiding the creation of the Health Care Engineering Systems Center at Illinois and the Jump Applied Research for Community Health through Engineering and Simulation (Jump ARCHES) partnership with OSF HealthCare in Peoria.

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Tamer Başar for his service as interim dean since January of this year. Under his leadership, the College’s excellence has continued to advance, and he has set a solid foundation for the future under the new dean. I also want to thank members of the search committee, chaired by Vice Chancellor for Research Susan Martinis, for their efforts to bring forward such a talented and accomplished pool of candidates.

Please join me in congratulating Rashid Bashir on his appointment as the next dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Andreas C. Cangellaris
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost