Elizabeth Hsiao-Wecksler

Last updated

Elizabeth T. Hsiao-Wecksler is an American biomechanics researcher specializing in human gait and balance, and in the design of devices for assisting in gait and posture. She is a professor and Willett Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. [1]

Contents

Education and career

Hsiao-Wecksler majored in mechanical engineering at Cornell University, graduating in 1987, and began working in industry in the desktop printing and copying division of Xerox. While doing so, she earned a master's degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1994. She returned to graduate study in biomechanics in 1995, working with Stephen Robinovitch at the University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley, and completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Berkeley in 2000. [2]

After postdoctoral research with James Collins at Boston University and Lewis Lipsitz and Casey Kerrigan at the Harvard Medical School, she became an assistant professor of mechanical science and mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2002. She earned tenure there as an associate professor in 2009, [2] becoming the first tenured woman in the department, [3] and was promoted to full professor in 2015. [2]

She also co-founded a spin-off company, IntelliWheels, in 2010, focusing on the improved design of geared wheels for wheelchairs, [2] [4] and was its scientific advisor through 2018. [2]

Personal life and activism

Hsiao-Wecksler co-founded LGBTQ advocacy groups at both Xerox and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, and has been an advocate for inclusion and diversity more generally at the University of Illinois. [3] [5]

Recognition

Hsiao-Wecksler was named an ASME Fellow in 2014, [6] and a Fellow of the American Society of Biomechanics in 2018. [3] She was president of the American Society of Biomechanics for the 2021-2022 term. [2]

The Society of Women Engineers named her a Distinguished Engineering Educator in 2018, "for steadfast commitment to student success and project-based and team-based learning; for leadership in revamping engineering curricula; and for serving as an encouraging role model and mentor". [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. Daniel Mote Jr.</span> American mechanical engineer

Clayton Daniel Mote Jr. is the President Emeritus of the National Academy of Engineering. He served as the president of the NAE from July 2013 to June 2019. He also served as President of the University of Maryland, College Park from September 1998 until August 2010. From 1967 to 1991, Mote was a professor in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as Vice Chancellor at Berkeley from 1991 to 1998. Mote is a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tandy Warnow</span> American computer scientist

Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutionary trees, both in biology and in historical linguistics, and also for multiple sequence alignment methods.

Hüseyin Şehitoğlu is a Turkish mechanical engineer who holds the John, Alice, and Sarah Nyquist Endowed Chair at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States. Hüseyin Şehitoğlu received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from City University London, in 1979, and a M.S., and Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1981 and 1983, respectively.

Tami Bond holds the Walter Scott, Jr. Presidential Chair in Energy, Environment and Health at Colorado State University since 2019. For many years she was a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, and an affiliate professor of Atmospheric Science. Bond has focused research on the effective study of black carbon or soot in the atmosphere. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. A MacArthur Fellowship was awarded to her in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kendra Sharp</span> American professor of engineering

Kendra Vail Sharp is an American engineer. She is a professor of mechanical engineering and the Richard and Gretchen Evans Professor in Humanitarian Engineering at Oregon State University College of Engineering.

Martin Ostoja-Starzewski is a Polish-Canadian-American scientist and engineer, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research includes work on deterministic and stochastic mechanics: random and fractal media, representative elementary volume in linear and nonlinear material systems, universal elastic anisotropy index, random fields, and bridging continuum mechanics to fluctuation theorem.

Andrew G. Alleyne is the Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He was previously the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in Engineering and Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on Power Optimization of Electro Thermal Systems at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work considers decision making in complex physical systems. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Karen A. Thole is an American mechanical engineer who has been serving as the 16th dean of the University of Michigan College of Engineering since August 2024. She previously served as the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University from 2006 to 2021. Thole was first promoted to professor in 2003 at Virginia Tech.

Thomas J. Dolan was an American engineer and educator. He was a professor and department head at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Charles E. Taylor was an American engineer. He was a Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (TAM) Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was known as Chuck.

Laura Lynn Pauley is an American mechanical engineer specializing in computational fluid dynamics, including the simulation of cavitation, flow separation, and large eddy simulation, with applications including the design of airfoils, boat propellors, and centrifugal pumps. She is a professor of mechanical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, the former Arthur L. Glenn Professor of Engineering Education at Penn State, and the interim executive director of the Penn State faculty senate.

Beth Ann Todd is an American engineering educator and biomechanical engineer who studies the mechanics of the human body and of assistive technology, and works to integrate graduate students in engineering into primary and secondary school mathematics and science education. She is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama.

Margaret Stacey Wooldridge is an American engineer known for her research on combustion of fuel-air mixtures and its byproducts, including the operation of gas turbines and diesel engines. She is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Walter J. Weber, Jr. Professor of Sustainable Energy, Environmental and Earth Systems Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Wooldridge Combustion Laboratory.

Leslie M. Phinney is an American thermal engineer and an expert on microscale heat transfer, particularly involving thin films, surfaces, and boundaries between different materials. She is a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories.

Michele J. Grimm is a British-American biomechanical engineer. She took on the role of Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Albany in 2022. She was previously the Wielenga Creative Engineering Endowed Professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at Michigan State University. Her research concerns the biomechanics of injury, particularly injuries in newborn children to the brachial plexus, a part of the nervous system connecting it to the upper body.

Deborah Lee Thurston is an American civil engineer specializing in the engineering design process and sustainable engineering. She is Gutsgell Professor Emerita of Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Iwona M. Jasiuk is a Polish-American materials scientist and bioengineer, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the former president of the Society of Engineering Science. Her research includes work on the mechanical properties of bone, of nanocomposites, and of 3D-printed cellular structures.

Caroline Clarke Hayes is an American computer scientist, roboticist, and mechanical engineer whose research concerns agent-based models, human–computer interaction, intelligent decision support systems, and more generally "the interface between people and technology for complex tasks". She is Lynn Gleason Professor of Interdisciplinary Engineering at Iowa State University, where she chairs the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Victoria Lynn Coverstone is a retired American aerospace engineer, the former chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Miami, and a professor emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include spacecraft attitude control and trajectory optimization.

Jill Startzell Higginson is an American biomechanical engineer and an expert on gait. Her research involves the observation of gait, the contributions of different muscles to gait, and the diagnosis of muscular problems involving gait. She is George W. Laird Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware, and the head of the university's Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab.

References

  1. ↑ "Prof. Elizabeth (Liz) Hsiao-Wecksler", People, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger College of Engineering, retrieved 2022-03-24
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Curriculum vitae (PDF), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Grainger College of Engineering, January 2022, retrieved 2022-03-24
  3. 1 2 3 Fellows, American Society of Biomechanics, retrieved 2022-03-24
  4. 1 2 "Distinguished Engineering Educator: Elizabeth Hsiao-Wecksler, Ph.D." (PDF), SWE Conference 2018, p. 124, retrieved 2022-03-24
  5. ↑ Sikandar, Zara (9 October 2013), "Faculty in STEM fields see little female representation", The Daily Illini, retrieved 2022-03-24
  6. ↑ ASME Fellows List (PDF), American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2014, retrieved 2022-03-24
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.