About the people in LIBNA
LIBNA Group Leader
Rashid Bashir, Ph.D.
Dean, Grainger College of Engineering
Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and Professor of Bioengineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Education
PhD, Purdue University (1992)
MSEE, Purdue University (1989)
BSEE, Texas Tech University (1987), Summa Cum Laude
Biography
Rashid Bashir completed his Ph.D. from Purdue University in Oct. 1992. From Oct. 1992 to Oct. 1998, he worked at National Semiconductor in the Analog/Mixed Signal Process Technology Development Group, where he was promoted to Sr. Engineering Manager. At National Semiconductor, he led the development and commercialization of 4 analog semiconductor process technologies. He joined Purdue University in Oct. 1998 as an Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Courtesy Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. In Oct. 2007, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Bioengineering. He was the Director of the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory (mntl.illinois.edu), a campus-wide clean room facility, from Oct. 2007 to Aug. 2013 and the Co-Director of the campus-wide Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (www.cnst.illinois.edu), a “collaboratory” aimed at facilitating center grants and large initiatives around campus in the area of nanotechnology. In Oct. 2016, he was named the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering. From Aug. 2013 to Aug 2017, he was the head of the Bioengineering Department. Since Jan. 2017, he has been the Interim Vice Dean and Chief Diversity Officer of the new Carle-Illinois “Engineering-Based” College of Medicine at UIUC and was appointed as the Executive Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer in Aug 2017. In Nov 2018, he was appointed as the 15th Dean of the College Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In May 2019, the College was named The Grainger College of Engineering recognizing over $300M of support from the Grainger Foundation.
He has authored or co-authored over 250 journal papers, over 200 conference papers and conference abstracts, and over 100 invited talks, and has been granted 50 patents. He is a fellow of 8 international professional societies (IEEE, AIMBE, AAAS, APS, IAMBE, RSC, BMES, and NAI). His research interests include bionanotechnology, 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. Prof. Bashir’s key technical contributions and achievements lie in the area of BioMEMS and biomedical nanotechnology, especially in the use of electrical- or mechanical-based label-free methods for detection of biological entities on a chip. In addition, he has also made key contributions to 3-D fabrication methods that can be used for tissue engineering and development of cellular systems. He has been involved in 3 startups that have licensed his technologies (BioVitesse, Inc., Daktari Diagnostics, and, most recently, Prenosis, Inc.).
In addition to leading his own research group, he was the PI on an NSF IGERT on Cellular and Molecular Mechanics and Bionanotechnology (2009–2016) and PI on an NIH Training Grant on Cancer Nanotechnology (2009–2016). He is also the campus lead and Co-PI on an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) on Emergent Behavior of Integrated Cellular Systems (headquartered at MIT, with partners at Georgia Tech and UIUC) (2009–2020). He was also Deputy Director of the NSF Nanobio Node of the NcN (Network for Computational Nanotechnology) at UIUC, and served on the external advisory board of the NIH-funded P41 BioMEMS Resource Center at Harvard/MGH and the NIH-funded Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at Stanford University, and on various editorial boards.