Zhi-Pei Liang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
2012

Zhi-Pei Liang received his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1989. He subsequently joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) first as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (working with the late Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur), and then as a faculty member in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Co-chair of the Integrative Imaging Theme of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu). He also has joint appointments in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Department of Bioengineering, all at UIUC.

Dr. Liang’s research interests include biomedical imaging, especially magnetic resonance imaging, theory and algorithms for image formation and analysis, and their application to functional neuroimaging, cancer imaging, and cardiac imaging.

Dr. Liang is a recipient of the Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award (Medical Physics, 1990), an NSF Research Initiation Award (1994), an NSF CAREER Award (1995), the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Early Career Achievement Award (1999), and the IFMBE’s Otto Schmitt award (2012). He was named Fellow of the UIUC Center for Advanced Study (1997), Henry Magnuski Scholar (1999-2001), and University Scholar (2001-2004). He was selected as a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE-EMBS (2002-2005), and received the Ronald W. Pratt Outstanding Teaching Award (2005) and the Engineering Council Award for Excellence in Advising (2006-2008) at UIUC. Recent work from his group has received several paper awards, including the 2009 Isidor I. Rabi award from the ISMRM (International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine), IEEE-ISBI Best Paper Award (2010), and IEEE-EMBC Best Paper Award (2010, 2011). Dr. Liang has served as Conference and/or Program Chair of several major international meetings, and as Vice President (2006-2009), President-elect (2010), and President (2011-2012) of IEEE-EMBS. He is a Fellow of IEEE (2006) and ISMRM (2010), and was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2005 and to the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2012.