4/15/2021 Huan Song
Bioengineering Founder Professor Joseph Irudayaraj was recognized for his experience, expertise and commitment to promoting the value of interdisciplinary research at the chemistry-engineering interface.
Written by Huan Song
Bioengineering Founder Professor Joseph Irudayaraj has been named a 2020 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). The RSC is an international not-for-profit organization connecting chemical scientists with each other, with other scientists, and with society as a whole. Founded in 1841 and based in London, UK, the RSC has an international membership of over 50,000. This fellowship recognizes Irudayaraj's influence in the scientific community and his experience, expertise and commitment to promoting the value of interdisciplinary research at the chemistry-engineering interface.
Irudayaraj joined the Illinois faculty in July 2017 after spending more than a decade at Purdue University where he made a significant breakthrough in utilizing gold nanorods and dark field plasmon imaging techniques, which made it possible to evaluate multiple different surface proteins and mRNA splicing in live cancer cells.
Much of his work focuses on exploring nanomaterials for biosensors and monitoring live cell dynamics. His groundbreaking work in phenotyping cancer cells has been successfully commercialized into a globally marketed diagnostic tool by Cytoviva Inc.
At Illinois, Irudayaraj is focusing on live cell monitoring across different model organisms incorporating super-resolution lifetime imaging and spectroscopy to evaluate epigenetic toxicity of environmental contaminants. He currently serves as the associate director for shared resources at the Cancer Center at Illinois and partners closely with clinicians at the Carle Foundation Hospital. He also holds joint appointments in the Carl Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and at Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Lab (MNTL).
Irudayaraj is also a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and a recipient of the Purdue College of Engineering Research Excellence Award and University Faculty Scholar award. He earned his Ph.D. at Purdue University and has held appointments at Pennsylvania State University and Utah State University.