Gregory Pluta
Center for Innovative Instrumentation Technology
gpluta@illinois.edu
The goal of the Center for Innovative Instrumentation Technology (CiiT) is technology transfer and commercialization of innovative sensor platforms for use in life science, agricultural systems, food safety, mobile systems, and water quality monitoring. As one of 70 active National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRCs), CiiT builds on 40 years of NSF IUCRC best practices in connecting universities with industry to keep research topics relevant to the Industry Advisory Board, which consists of paying members of the center. Some sensor platforms currently part of CiiT include optical chem/bio sensors, microelectronic sensors, imaging modalities, smartphone-based sensors, and micro/nanofluidics. Over a dozen faculty have contributed to center projects, and any University of Illinois faculty are eligible to participate as CiiT project PIs.
Gregory Pluta is the Managing Director of the Center for Innovative Instrumentation Technology (CiiT). He previously served as Program Manager for the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Office (HPCMO), responsible for technology transfer in the areas of computational chemistry, biology, computer networking, and security, and managed HPC training for DoD scientists through the DoD PET program. He also worked as a systems analyst, consultant, and software developer at Accenture’s Chicago-based Technical Architecture group. Mr. Pluta served at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications as a Technical Program Manager and Project Manager for over ten years, and spent three years as a Site Operations Manager and chair of the National Site Managers Forum for the National Science Foundation NEES experimental network. He has a B.S. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois, where he developed an experimental structural dynamics laboratory to verify nonlinear analytical solutions to high-speed rotational dynamic systems, and developed and taught undergraduate dynamics and control systems laboratories.