Thenkurussi Kesavadas is the Director of Health Care Engineering Systems Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Illinois, Kesavadas was a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo (NY), where he founded the University at Buffalo Virtual Reality Laboratory. He received his doctoral degree from the Pennsylvania State University in 1995. Kesavadas has been in the forefront of Virtual Reality and its application to medicine since 1993, when this field was still in its infancy. In 2004, Dr. Kesavadas was honored as the “Inventor of the Year” Western New York. He has also won numerous awards including SUNY Chancellor’s award for Innovation in 2004 and UB Visionary of the year award in 2010. He developed the world’s first stand-alone virtual reality Robotic Surgical Simulator RoSS and also co-founded two start-up companies. His own research interests are in the areas of medical robotics and simulation, virtual reality in design, haptics and human-computer interaction. Kesavadas is a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineering and a member of IEEE.

As HCES Center director, Kesavadas will lead the development of the new Center and its research program. He also serves as “Engineer in Chief” of the Jump ARCHES collaborative partnership between the College of Engineering at Illinois and health care providers at OSF HealthCare and at the University of Illinois’ College of Medicine at Peoria.

Read a Q&A With Dr. Kesavadas