Rohit Bhargava is Founder Professor of Engineering and serves as the Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His primary appointment is in the Department of Bioengineering with joint appointments in several engineering departments and Chemistry as well as in the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine. Rohit graduated with a dual-degree B.Tech. (1996) from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and received a doctoral degree from Case Western Reserve University (2000). After a stint at the National Institutes of Health, he has been at Illinois as Assistant (2005-2011), Associate (2011-2012) and Full (2012-) Professor. Rohit is widely recognized for his research on chemical imaging and advances in theory, instrumentation, and applications in cancer pathology. Current work in chemical imaging in his laboratory focuses on theoretical modeling that can push the limits of speed and quality of infrared spectroscopic imaging as well as its application in several novel areas. In particular,  Rohit’s group aims to recognize and subtype cancer by its underlying molecular characteristics, by advanced chemical imaging and application of modern machine learning, ultimately allowing for better treatment of patients. His innovative teaching and mentoring has been consistently recognized by the success of his students. He conceived and currently directs of the Tissue Microenvironment training program supported by a T32 grant from the NIH. Rohit has also served to connect the research community in new and exciting ways to take on basic science and engineering questions that surround cancer. He was the first assistant professor hired into Illinois’ Bioengineering Department and played a key role in its development. He proposed and has served for ~10 years to develop the Cancer Center at Illinois - a basic science center at the convergence of high quality technology and engineering and oncology.

The central theme of research in our group is the development of novel chemical imaging technology and structures that can be employed to detect, diagnose and understand tissue structure and cancer pathology. These biological sensors may be optical (spectroscopic imaging), material (probes) or computational and physical models. Another major theme is the development of novel instrumentation approaches to fast, high fidelity infrared spectroscopic imaging and development of novel algorithms for information extraction from large imaging data sets.

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