Professor Zhong-Jin Ruan earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1987. His research interests include operator spaces, operator algebras, and locally compact quantum groups. He has obtained several awards including the Mahlon M. Day Award for Distinguished Mathematical Research and College of LAS Alumni Discretionary Award. He also has served as the editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, and has been the editor of Frontiers of Mathematics since 2008.

Professor Mats Selen, the Carnegie Foundation/CASE 2016 U.S. Professor of the Year, earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1989. An international leader in experimental particle physics, Professor Selen has made significant contributions to four distinct research areas: (1) the measurement of the D* branching ratios and an analysis of D* mesons that set a new reference standard; (2) study of the charm quark and contributions to current understanding of charmed particles and their decays; (3) radiative and hadronic D decays; and (4) innovations in

Dr. Marilyn Holguin is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her B.A. with honors at Lafayette College in 2005 and her Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Illinois in 2015. She specializes in British literature from the long eighteenth-century (1660-1800) with a focus on Restoration tragedies and early novels.

Professor Andrew Alleyne is the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in the UIUC College of Engineering, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. He also is the director of the NSF-sponsored Center for Power Optimization of Electro-Thermal Systems. His current research is focused on control theory and applications, and addresses a range of issues within controls: the analysis and design of control systems in a dimensionless framework, advanced motion control through iterative learning control and adaptive feedforward techniques,

Professor Liang Y. Liu, is an associate professor of civil engineering and a William E. O’Neil Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the UIUC College of Engineering’s associate dean of facilities and capital planning and was the department of civil and environmental engineering’s associate head director of undergraduate studies from 2010-16. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in construction engineering and management, including construction productivity, cost estimating, construction management information systems, and construction case studies. In 2003,

Erol Tutumluer is the Paul F. Kent Endowed Faculty Scholar and a professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as the department’s director of international programs. He specializes in transportation geotechnics with research interests and expertise in the characterization of pavement and railroad track geomaterials, modeling granular foundation systems, and construction practices for transportation infrastructure. He also serves as the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the new Transportation Geotechnics Elsevier journal.

Professor Benito J. Mariñas is the head of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Harold Munson Outstanding Teacher Award, the Ross Judson Buck '07 Outstanding Counselor Award, and the Arthur and Virginia Nauman Faculty Scholar Award. His research interests lie in various mechanistic aspects of

Professor Philip Krein earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois in 1982. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Professor Krein received many awards. In 2015-2016, he is Chair of the IEEE Transportation Electrification Community.