The Stillman Lecture Series--Celebrating Dr. Greg Stillman's Legacy

9/5/2018 Janet McGreevy

Join MNTL on September 26 to Hear Speaker Dr. Aydogan Ozcan

Written by Janet McGreevy

The Stillman Lecture Series at the Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory was established by Director Brian T. Cunningham as a way to celebrate and honor Professor Gregory E. Stillman’s extensive scientific research contributions to engineering, and his dedication to students. Lecture events take place during each fall and spring term.

The next Stillman Lecture will take place on September 26, hosted at the MNTL building located at 208 North Wright Street. The Lecture will be held in Room 1000. The event will open at 2:00 p.m. with an informal gathering of students, who will have the opportunity to talk directly to the speaker, Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, followed next by his lecture, and ending with a reception starting at 4:00 p.m. Be sure to join us! (No registration is required.)

Ozcan's lecture will be on "Deep Learning-enabled Computational Microscopy and Sensing."

Deep learning is a class of machine learning techniques that uses multi-layered artificial neural networks for automated analysis of signals or data. The name comes from the general structure of deep neural networks, which consist of several layers of artificial neurons, each performing a nonlinear operation, stacked over each other. Beyond its mainstream applications such as the recognition and labeling of specific features in images, deep learning holds numerous opportunities for revolutionizing image formation, reconstruction, and sensing fields. In this presentation, Ozcan will provide an overview of recent work on the use of deep neural networks in advancing computational microscopy and sensing systems, also covering their biomedical applications.

 

Dr. AYDOGAN OZCAN

 

 

MNTL’s speaker for the fall 2018 Stillman Lecture will be the notable Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, of UCLA. Ozcan is the Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA, an HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and leads the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory at UCLA. He is also the Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute. He holds 37 issued patents and more than 20 pending patent applications, and is the author of one book and the co-author of over 500 peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals and conferences. 

Ozcan received his Ph.D. degree at Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering department. After a short post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, he was appointed as research faculty at Harvard Medical School’s Wellman Center for Photomedicine in 2006. He subsequently joined UCLA in 2007.

Ozcan is the founder and a member of the Board of Directors of Lucendi Inc. and Holomic/Cellmic LLC, which was named a Technology Pioneer by The World Economic Forum in 2015. He is a Fellow of the International Photonics Society (SPIE), the Optical Society of America (OSA), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and the Guggenheim Foundation.

He has received major awards for his seminal contributions to computational imaging, sensing, and diagnostics, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, International Commission for Optics Prize, Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, Rahmi M. Koc Science Medal, International Photonics Society Early Career Achievement Award, Army Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Navy Young Investigator Award, IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and Distinguished Lecturer Award, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, National Academy of Engineering, The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Award, and MIT’s TR35 Award.

 

DR. GREG STILLMAN’S LEGACY

 

Dr. Gregory Stillman
Dr. Gregory Stillman

 

A native Nebraskan, Gregory E. Stillman graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1958 with a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering. He next served in the U.S. Air Force as an officer and pilot affiliated with the Strategic Air Command, before entering the University of Illinois graduate program in electrical engineering in 1963. After earning his Ph.D. in 1967—his mentor was Professor Nick Holonyak Jr.—he joined the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, working there until he was invited to serve as a member of the U of I electrical engineering faculty in 1975.

 

Dr. Greg Stillman at his 60th birthday party.
Dr. Greg Stillman at his 60th birthday party.

 

His research and teaching were key to building and sustaining engineering’s legacy at Illinois. Today’s wireless and broadband communications owe much to Stillman’s work. His research shed light on the fundamental properties of crystal systems, particularly the III-V family of semiconductors. He contributed to the development of advanced characterization techniques for carrier mobility, photoconductivity, far infrared emission, and photothermal methods of studying impurities, and many of these evaluation techniques are now widely used for compound semiconductors. Stillman’s leadership was also critical to the opening of the Microelectronics Laboratory in 1989, the precursor to today's MNTL; he served as the facility’s first director.

A prolific researcher and author in the field, he published over 300 papers. One of the most notable observations made by those asked to describe him is that he was always a caring mentor; he supervised the doctoral work of over forty students while at Illinois, and taught hundreds.

 


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This story was published September 5, 2018.