Engineering Endowed Chairs and Professors
Bucks for Brains
In 1997, the Kentucky legislature gave its approval to an ambitious initiative aimed at overhauling the state’s higher education system.
One pivotal aspect of this reform was the establishment of the Research Challenge Trust Fund, a calculated investment in university research with the objectives of creating employment opportunities, fostering fresh economic activity, and opening new horizons for the residents of Kentucky.
Popularly known as “Bucks for Brains,” this program leverages state funds to match private donations, effectively doubling the impact of private investments that support research endeavors in strategically defined fields, thus sowing the seeds for a brighter future.
Bucks for Brains plays a vital role in attracting and retaining world-renowned researchers and scholars to Kentucky, many of whom are also esteemed educators. The exceptional caliber of their work enhances the academic reputation of the Commonwealth on both national and international levels.
The University of Louisville benefits significantly from the Research Challenge Trust Fund’s support, enabling it to bring the foremost scholars and scientists from around the globe to Kentucky.
Engineering Endowed Chairs and Professors
The presence of endowed faculty members at Speed School plays a crucial role in advancing our pursuit of continuous excellence in the realms of teaching, research, and patient care. Endowed positions serve as a testament to the impactful collaboration between faculty members and philanthropists, as they work together to identify areas of exploration and transform them into reality. This partnership not only fuels the spirit of discovery but also reinforces our commitment to academic advancement and the betterment of patient well-being.
Endowed Chair in Bioimaging
Amir A. Amini, a professor in department of electrical and computer engineering, researches medical imaging and biomedical image processing and analysis.
His general interests include development of new physiologic imaging and image analysis techniques, including techniques for quantification of the heart motion from cardiac MRI and its applications for determining mechanical strain on the heart. In the area of vascular imaging he is working to develop techniques to determine intravascular pressures, shear stress and other mechanical indices of function from phase-contrast magnetic resonance images of blood flow.
In 2007, he was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an honor given to only one tenth of one percent of members each year. His nomination cited his contributions to cardiovascular imaging and medical image analysis.
Amini has been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging since 1999. He was the scientific program chair for the IEEE Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Biomedical Image Analysis in 1996 and 2000 and has served on the scientific program committee of numerous workshops and conferences. He was the General Chair of Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Conference on Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images, part of the SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium between 2002-2006. In 2007, Amini served as general Co-Chair for the SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium.
Before joining U of L in 2006, worked for a decade at Washington University in St. Louis, where he established the Cardiovascular Image Analysis Laboratory. Prior to that he completed postdoctoral research in radiology at Yale and served on the faculty for four years.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1983, where at age 18 he was the youngest member of the graduating class, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1984 and 1990.
Endowed Chair in Manufacturing & Materials
Dr. Atre is leading an effort to establish a new inter-disciplinary program on Digital Manufacturing and Design at the University of Louisville. Dr. Atre’s current research in advanced materials and multi-scale manufacturing focus on additive manufacturing and powder injection molding of metal and ceramics. His research group, the Materials Innovation Guild, has generated over 200 publications, 7 issued and licensed patents, and over 20 intellectual property filings.
Endowed Chair of Advanced Manufacturing
Dr. Kevin Chou started his career at University of Louisville (UofL) in January 2017, as the Edward R. Clark Chair of Advanced Manufacturing, in Speed School’s Industrial Engineering Department. He is also the former Director of UofL’s Additive Manufacturing Institute of Science and Technology from 2019 – 2020.
Dr. Chou is currently on leave serving as a Program Director in the Advanced Manufacturing cluster at the National Science Foundation.
Prior to joining UofL, Dr. Chou was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Alabama. Dr. Chou’s research and teaching interests include design and manufacturing, CAD/CAM, mechanics, metrology and materials. His recent study fields have been focused on integrated materials, design and manufacturing innovations, including metal additive manufacturing, metal matrix composite machining, and diamond coatings.
Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy Research
Dr. Thad Druffel is Theme Leader for Solar Manufacturing Research and Development at the Conn Center. He has been with the Conn Center since 2010. His current research involves re-purposing former newspaper and other printing facilities like Kodak, Fuji and Polaroid to convert them to producing renewable energy products thereby making energy more accessible to people.
Through Druffel’s work, he has mentored post-doctoral, graduate, undergraduate and high school researchers, and his research has resulted in publications, patent applications, presentations, collaborations, spinout companies and funding.
Lutz Endowed Chair
Ayman El-Baz, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville, KY. Dr. El-Baz has nearly 20 years of hands-on experience in the fields of bioimaging modeling and computer-assisted diagnostic systems. He has developed new techniques for analyzing 3D medical images. His work has been reported at several prestigious international conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, MICCAI, etc.) and in journals (e.g., IEEE TIP, IEEE TBME, IEEE TITB, Brain, etc.). His work related to novel image analysis techniques for lung cancer and autism diagnosis have earned him multiple awards, including: first place at the annual Research Louisville 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012 meetings, and the “Best Paper Award in Medical Image Processing” from the prestigious ICGST International Conference on Graphics, Vision and Image Processing (GVIP-2005). Dr. El-Baz has authored or coauthored more than 300technical articles.
Winnia Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Adel S. Elmaghraby, an IEEE Life Senior Member, is the Speed School Director of Industrial Research and Innovation, Director of Research and Innovation for the University of Louisville Digital Transformation Center, and Winnia Professor of CSE and former chair of the Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Louisville. He has also held appointments at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has advised over 60 master’s graduates and 37 doctoral graduates. His research and publications span intelligent systems, neural networks, cyber-security, visualization and simulation. The IEEE-Computer Society has recognized his work with multiple awards including a Golden Core membership and as a member of the Distinguished Speaker Program.
Endowed Chair of Biomechanics in Bioengineering
Guruprasad A. Giridharan received his B.Tech in chemical engineering from the University of Madras, India in 1998, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT in 2002. He joined the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville in 2006. His current research foci include biomedical device development and testing, physiologic control systems, mechanical circulatory support for Fontan circulation, and myocardial recovery strategies. In the past 6 years, Dr. Giridharan has generated over $20 Million in research funding, which includes grant awards from the American Heart Association, NIH R01, NIH R15, and NIH SBIR programs. He has published 53 peer reviewed manuscripts, 83 abstracts, 3 book chapters, and 19 patents and disclosures.
Endowed Chair, Cardiac Implant Science
Steven C. Koenig, Ph.D., professor in the departments of bioengineering and cardiothoracic surgery, joined the UofL faculty in 1996. Dr. Koenig was named a University Scholar in 2009 and received the Distinguished Faculty Award in Research for Basic and Applied Sciences in 2014.
Dr. Koenig’s research interests include biomedical engineering with broad focus on understanding the physiologic benefits of mechanical circulatory support (MCS) devices on the heart and vasculature for the treatment of heart failure. Along with Mark Slaugher, M.D., he developed the Advanced Heart Failure Research Program at the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute that conducts clinical, engineering and scientific research and development of new diagnostics and therapeutics for advanced heart failure.
After earning both his undergraduate degree and masters of science in electrical engineering from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, Dr. Koenig completed his doctoral work in biomedical engineering at the University of Texas in Austin.
Since joining the Uof L faculty, Dr. Koenig has published more than 100 articles and received more than $55 million in research funding from the NIH-SBIR, KSTC, and numerous foundations and industry sponsors. His efforts in both pre-clinical testing and clinical trials have led to successful CE Mark and FDA approval of many MCS devices in clinical use today. He holds 11 patents and disclosures.
Dr. Koenig serves on the Board of Trustees for the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs and the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and recently served ASAIO Board of Trustees (Program Chair, President, Editorial Board) and Gordon Conference Assisted Circulation (co-Chair 2021, co-Vice Chair 2019, 2023). He is currently an AIMBE fellow.
Endowed Chair of Infrastructure Research
Mark McGinley is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. The structural engineering and building scientist has worked for more than 20 years in research and forensic engineering practice in building systems. A recognized expert in masonry building systems, McGinley has conducted wide-ranging research in building materials and experimental evaluation of building systems.
McGinley’s research has focused on the structural performance of concrete frames and masonry walls, water penetration of building envelopes, and the performance of brick veneer and steel-stud wall systems. He also has evaluated energy systems of existing buildings and worked on demonstration projects evaluating energy-related technologies such as condensing heat exchangers and thermal mass effects of nighttime ventilation.
At U of L McGinley will be expanding his previous efforts into a wide range of infrastructure-related issues including developing sensors for health monitoring of engineering systems and developing innovative ways to repair and strengthen infrastructure.
The American Society for Testing and Materials awarded him its Gilbert Robinson Memorial Award in 2001 for his committee work and efforts in masonry testing and performance. He also has been active in the Masonry Society as chair of its design practices committee and member of other committees and task groups; he received the society’s Distinguished Service Award in 1998.
Before joining U of L in 2007, he had been chair of the civil, architectural, agricultural and environmental engineering department at North Carolina A&T State University, where he had worked for 19 years and developed, built and managed its structural engineering laboratory. He earned his doctoral, master’s and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering from University of Alberta in Canada.
Endowed Chair for E-Commerce
Olfa Nasraoui, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the computer science and computer engineering department. She also is director of the Knowledge Discovery and Web Mining Laboratory at UofL’s Speed School of Engineering.
Her research explores computer and machine-learning methods of mining information from massive data sets, including text and web data. In addition to her work on computational intelligence, Nasraoui works on stream data mining, web mining and web personalization — topics identified as key areas of growth and technology for e-businesses. She was an early contributor in setting a computational framework for web usage data mining based on soft clustering and later based on robust clustering. Her work in the area of data mining is inspired by natural evolution and the natural immune system, and has been widely-recognized and well-cited.
Recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award for outstanding young scientists in 2002, she is principal investigator on multiyear NSF grants related to web usage mining and personalization, and to mining solar images to support astrophysics research. She has NASA and NSF funding for research developing scalable and automated mining and retrieval methods to sift through large online databases in search of images with massive coronal ejections called solar loops. From 2004-2006 she was also involved in a U.S. Navy subcontract with a local business to convert a web site to a personalized knowledge portal.
She recently was chosen as a member of Academic Key’s “Who’s Who in Engineering Education” and “Who’s Who in America.” Nasraoui has more than 90 refereed publications, including 20 journal papers and book chapters and eight edited volumes. She has served on organizing and program committees of several conferences and workshops, and is a member of several professional organizations, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), IEEE Women in Engineering and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Nasraoui earned her doctorate in computer engineering and computer science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she also earned a master of science degree in electrical engineering and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and in computer engineering.
Prior to joining U of L in 2004, she was at the University of Memphis and had been a visiting research scholar at Colorado School of Mines.
Duthie Endowed Chair of Engineering Logistics
Dr. Pratik J. Parikh is the Department Chair and Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Louisville. Prior to joining UofL in August 2020, he was a faculty at Wright State University in Dayton, OH (2009-2020) and a member of the Science Team at Manhattan Associates in Atlanta, GA (2006-2009). He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech (2006). Dr. Parikh’s research in data analytics and optimization with applications in supply chain, retail, and healthcare has been supported by over $3 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, the Veterans Affairs, state of OH, and industry. He has served on various boards at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS). For his contributions towards research, teaching, and service, he has been honored with the IISE-LSC Division Teaching Award, IISE Global Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, INFORMS Volunteer Service Award, and several awards at Wright State University and in the Dayton-area, including the Dayton Forty Under 40 Award. Dr. Parikh’s students have received multiple Best Track Paper awards and national scholarships for their outstanding research accomplishments.
Vogt Endowed Chair in Advanced Manufacturing
Dan O. Popa (Senior Member, IEEE), has nearly 30 years of research experience in robotics and automation. His early research work (1993-1998) include Adaptive Force Control and Motion Planning for Nonholonomic Robots. In 1998, he joined the Center for Automation Technologies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as a Research Scientist, where he focused on precision robotics, micromanufacturing and MEMS. In 2004, he became an Assistant and then an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington until 2015. Since 2016, he has been the Vogt Endowed Chair in Advanced Manufacturing and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Louisville. He is currently the Director of the Louisville Automation and Robotics Research Institute (LARRI) and the Head of the Next Generation Research Group (NGS) conducting research in two main areas: 1) social and physical human–robot interaction through adaptive interfaces and robot tactile skins; and 2) the design, characterization, modeling, and control of micro, nano and precision robotic systems. Dr. Popa is the recipient of several prestigious awards and the author of over 300 peer reviewed conference and journal articles, mainly in IEEE and ASME publications. He has been very active in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), including extensive competition, workshop, conference, and journal service.
Winnia Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Thomas D. Rockaway, Ph.D., P.E., is a Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, and Director for the Center for Infrastructure Research at the University of Louisville. His research work has focused on identifying methods to extend the life and improve the performance of urban infrastructure. Much of his worked has included water and wastewater initiatives and incorporating green concepts into existing systems. Prior to his work at the University, he has served as a geotechnical engineer for a large power corporation, a regional consultant and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. He has provided foundation and subsurface recommendations for structures ranging from single story dwellings to multi-story buildings. He has doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Masters and Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from Purdue University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from DePauw University.
Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy Research
Dr. Jagannadh Satyavolu is Theme Leader, Biomass and Biofuels for the Conn Center. He brings decades of experience from both academia and industry, and has been with the Conn Center since 2011. The professor’s research has led to more than 15 U.S. and international patents for concept to commercialization projects. Two of his current projects span the spectrum of chemical engineering, from working on the creation of a new low-calorie sugar, to the production of a bio-based coal substitute made from wood.
e-On Endowed Chair in Sustainability
Dr. Joshua Spurgeon, Theme Leader for Solar Fuels at the Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research in the J.B. Speed School of Engineering, has been funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program for research and education over the next 5 years. The CAREER Award is one of NSF’s most prestigious honors. Spurgeon is especially distinguished as a non-faculty recipient, one of the few ever awarded.
Spurgeon’s research at Conn Center is on the production of hydrogen fuel from water with solar energy. By shining sunlight onto a photocatalyst in water, the hydrogen-oxygen bond can be broken to store the solar energy on-demand as hydrogen, which is an energy-dense product. This fuel is especially useful in transportation and utilities and has no greenhouse gas emissions.
Winnia Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Sun got her Ph.D. from Northwestern University, 2005. She is a member of ACI technical committee 228 (Non destructive testing), 236 (Material science) and 238 (fresh properties). She has been awarded research funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, and Portland Cement Association.
Samuel T. Fife Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Kevin Walsh is the Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Studies, and Facilities for the Speed School of Engineering at the University of Louisville. He is also the Fife Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the founder of the $30M 10,000 sq ft UofL Micro/NanoTechnology Center (MNTC). Prof. Walsh is the director of the KY Multiscale Advanced Manufacturing node (www.kymultiscale.net), which is part of the 16-site National Science Foundation National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure network (NSF NNCI). Dr. Walsh has published over 150 technical papers in the areas of micro/nanotechnology, sensors, semiconductors, microelectronics, and MEMS. His research group has received over $35M of external research funding from DoD, DOE, NSF, NASA, NIH and industry. Prof. Walsh has 12 awarded patents and is the co-founder of 4 technical start-up companies. Dr. Walsh has taught over 20 different courses, advised over 30 completed theses, and has twice been presented with the School’s top Research Award. In 2014, he was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors.
Contact
Bucks for Brains begins with donors who want to make a difference by creating or contributing to an endowed chair or professorship. For more information, please contact:
Teresa Leezer
Senior Director of Development
teresa.leezer@louisville.edu