The Cancer Community @ Illinois (CC@IL) is pleased to announce it has named its long-time faculty coordinator, Rohit Bhargava, as director for a three-year term.
Bhargava, who has served as the CC@IL faculty coordinator for the past four years, will begin this role immediately. With his exceptional research productivity and experience in leading the CC@IL, he will spearhead efforts to unite researchers in the effort to find better ways to prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat cancer. The CC@IL provides resources for cancer-related activities across the campus, nucleates new programs related to cancer research, and fosters connections with clinical partners.
Bhargava, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering, is deeply involved in cancer research, with extensive grant funding for numerous projects. One example is a project aimed at developing innovative cancer imaging techniques to determine the risk of lethal prostate cancer upon initial diagnosis. This project, “3D Prostate Histochemometry to Predict Disease Recurrence,” has been awarded $1,606,899 over four years by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health.
Bhargava received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He has a full time faculty affiliation with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, is a research affiliate at the Mills Breast Cancer Institute at Carle Foundation Hospital, and has played a central role in the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative’s (IHSI) support of cancer-related research. His fields of professional interest are infrared spectroscopic imaging, cancer pathology, probes for molecular imaging, polymer structure, and numerical methods for image processing.
The CC@IL is supported by IHSI, the College of Engineering, the Department of Bioengineering, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
For more information on the CC@IL visit their website.