Rashid Bashir
Rashid Bashir is Professor of Bioengineering, the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, and is currently the Dean of Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also been the Department Head of Bioengineering and the Director of the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was member of the core founding team for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the world’s first engineering-based College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was a faculty member at Purdue University, where he started his academic career.
Previously, he spent 6 years at National Semiconductor Corporation commercializing analog and RF chip manufacturing technologies. He has held a Visiting Scientist position at Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriner’s Hospital for Children and was Visiting Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He was the recipient of the Joel and Spira teaching Award, the NSF Faculty Early Career Award, and the IEEE EMBS Technical Achievement award. In 2018, he received the Pritzker Distinguished Lectureship Award from BMES. He also received the 2021 AIMBE Professional Impact Award for Education, Citation “For leadership in bioengineering education, diagnostic technology development, and a new engineering-based medical school curriculum”. He is a member of the Executive Committee on the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago (a partnership between UIUC, Northwestern University and University of Chicago).
His research group is interested in micro-fluidics and nanotechnology based diagnostic technologies for precision and personalized medicine, and 3D bio-fabrication of multi-cellular engineered living systems for biological soft robotics and models for drug screening. He has authored or co-authored over 300 journal papers and has been granted over 60 patents. He is a fellow of IEEE, BMES, AIMBE, APS, IAMBE, NAI, RSC, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is academic co-founder of Prenosis, Inc. and VedaBio, Inc. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2024.
He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas Tech University and his M.S and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.