University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)

Richard and Loan Hill Professorships of Engineering

Dear colleagues:

I would like to officially announce the recipients of the first two Richard
and Loan Hill Professorships of Engineering in the University of Illinois
at Chicago. We are grateful for the generosity of Mr. Richard Hill (alumus
of UIC BME 1967) and Mrs. Loan Hill for providing three $500,000
Professorships to the College of Engineering. I wish to acknowledge the
work done by the previous Dean Larry Kennedy in getting these
professorships. On April 14, 2005, the first two Professorships were given
to Professor Ahmed Shabana and Professor Ouri Wolfson by Chancellor Sylvia
Manning and Richard Hill. A third Professorship will be announced at a
later date. Brief descriptions of the biographies of the two recipients
are given below. Please join me in congratulating our winners.

Ahmed Shabana is a Professor of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
department. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1982 and
worked as a postdoctoral fellow there before joining UIC in Fall 1983. He
is internationally known for his research contributions in the areas of
large scale computations as applied to dynamic systems, specifically
multi-body systems such as vehicles, machines, and robots. Specifically,
he is most widely cited for his work on multi-body dynamics which has more
than 500 citations. He has published more than 130 conference papers, presentations and technical reports, and is the author of four
books. His publications have been in prestigious journals such as ASME
Journal of Mechanical Design, and ASME Journal of Vibrations and
Acoustics. He has maintained a steady stream of research funding (a total
of $3.5 million) from the National Science Foundation, Army, Argonne, and
others over the years. In addition, Prof. Shabana is an excellent
teacher. He teaches courses on Multi-Body Dynamics and Computer Analysis.
Professor Shabana has supervised the work of 30 Ph.D. students, 30 M.S.
students and 25 visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows. His service
roles to his profession are also very noteworthy. He has served on the
editorial board of five journals, Founding Chair of the ASME Technical
Committee on Multibody Systems and Nonlinear Dynamics, and on the Program Committees of numerous conferences. He has been recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Mechanical Engineers in 1996, a Fulbright Scholar Award in 1997, and a Humboldt Prize in 1995.

Ouri Wolfson is a Professor of the Computer Science department. He
received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences, New York University, in 1984. Subsequently, he
worked at the Technion in Israel as an Assistant Professor from 1985-89,
and at Columbia University as an Associate Professor from 1991-99 before
moving to UIC as a Professor in 1999. Prof. Wolfson is internationally
known for his research contributions in the areas of databases. He has
published more than 36 journal articles, 73 conference papers, eight book
chapters, and three patents. His publications have been in prestigious
journals such as ACM Computing Surveys, ACM Transactions on Database
Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has
maintained a steady stream of research funding (a total of $12 million)
from the National Science Foundation, Army Research Laboratories, DARPA,
NATO, Air Force, and others over the years. In addition, Prof. Wolfson is
an excellent teacher. He teaches courses on databases and operating
systems. In terms of awards, Professor Wolfson is a Fellow of the
Association of Computing Machinery, and the recipient of the Best Paper
Award from the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data
Management (MDM 2004). In addition, Professor Wolfson has supervised the
work of several Ph.D. students. His service roles to his profession are
also very noteworthy; they include five Editorships of journals, Program
Committee Co-Chairman or General Co-Chairman for six conferences, and
Member of Program Committee for 81 conferences.

Prith Banerjee
Dean, College of Engineering and
UIC Distinguished Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago
Room 838 SEO
851 South Morgan Street
Chicago, IL 60607-7043
Ph: (312) 996-2400
Fax: (312) 996-8664
Cell: (847) 757-8708
prith@uic.edu
URL: www.uic.edu/~prith