Dr. Michael F. Insana Appointed Department Head

Dean Ilesanmi Adesida has announced the appointment of Dr. Michael F. Insana as Department Head for the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The appointment is effective March 16th, 2010.

Dr. Insana was previously the Interim Head of the Department of Bioengineering and has also served as the Director of Graduate Studies. Dr. Insana received his PhD in medical physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1983. He was a research physicist at the FDA from 1984-1987, Professor of Radiology and Physiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center from 1987-1999, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Davis from 1999-2004. Currently, Dr. Insana is Professor of Bioengineering and an affiliate faculty member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Dr. Insana leads the Ultrasonic Imaging Laboratory where research focuses on the development of novel ultrasonic instrumentation and methods for imaging soft tissue microstructure, elasticity and blood flow. The goal is to understand basic mechanisms of lesion formation, disease progression, and responses to therapy. His research includes the fundamentals of imaging system design and performance evaluation, signal processing, detection and estimation. His lab uses hydrogels to develop models of visco- and poroelastic behavior of soft tissues for cancer imaging. Through collaborations with industry, Dr. Insana's lab is investigating spatio-temporal filtering for noise reduction and enhanced spatial resolution with applications in breast elasticity imaging and arterial-wall shear-stress estimation.

Dr. Insana is currently a member of the IEEE and Acoustical Society of America, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and Associate Editor for IEEE Transaction on Medical Imaging.