Stephen Boppart named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

Bioengineering Professor Stephen Boppart, Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of Imaging at Illinois and the GSK Center for Optical Molecular Imaging at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Boppart will be formally inducted at the ninth annual meeting of the NAI in Phoenix, Arizona, on April 10, 2020.

Boppart has appointments in the departments of Bioengineering and in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) within The Grainger College of Engineering. He serves as executive associate dean and chief diversity officer for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He also has affiliations with a number of centers and laboratories on campus, including the Nick Holonyak Jr. Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He has co-founded three companies, and the two more recent, Diagnostics Photonics and PhotoniCare, include novel optical imaging technologies for surgical and primary care applications, respectively.

At Beckman, he works with a team of 25 researchers investigating novel optical diagnostic imaging technologies for basic science and translational clinical applications. The campuswide Imaging at Illinois initiative, for which he serves as director, leverages the strengths and diversity of more than 100 faculty working in all aspects of imaging science, technology, and applications.

Boppart received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Illinois in Electrical Engineering, his Ph.D. in Medical and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency training in internal medicine through the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He has published more than 350 invited and contributed publications and holds more than 45 patents related to optical biomedical imaging technology.

From 2006-2008, he served as founding director of the Mills Breast Cancer Institute, and he holds a research position with Carle Foundation Hospital. His efforts included leading the creation of a new building and developing new infrastructure to support translational research and technology development in biomedical research between the University of Illinois and Carle Foundation Hospital.

The NAI Fellows program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. Election as an NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors. To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 41,500 issued U.S. patents, which have generated more than 11,000 licensed technologies and companies, and created more than 36 million jobs. In addition, NAI Fellow discoveries have generated more than $1.6 trillion in revenue.

The 2019 Fellow class represents 136 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes worldwide, and the new Fellows collectively hold more than 3,500 issued U.S. patents. Among the 2019 Fellows are six recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology & Innovation or U.S. National Medal of Science and four Nobel Laureates. Their collective body of research covers a range of scientific disciplines including neurobehavioral sciences, horticulture, photonics and nanomedicine.

The NAI list of its Fellows ...