Professor Natasha Devroye named Richard and Loan Hill Professor
Professor Natasha Devroye named Richard and Loan Hill Professor Heading link
This month, Professor Natasha Devroye was awarded the Richard and Loan Hill endowed professorship.
Richard and his wife Loan Hill have been generous supporters of the UIC College of Engineering and College of Medicine for years, with a total of more than $9 million given to the University. Rick is a 1974 UIC bioengineering graduate and earned his MBA from Syracuse University in 1981. In 2008, Rick became the first recipient of an honorary UIC Doctor of Engineering degree. He was named a UIC Engineering Outstanding Alumnus in 2002. He previously served as the chairman of the UIC Engineering Advisory Board and the University of Illinois Foundation.
Rick has deep experience in all aspects of the semiconductor industry, as well as in corporate governance. He was the chairman and CEO of Novellus Systems, a leader in the design and manufacture of semiconductor equipment used to fabricate integrated circuits that was sold to Lam Research for $3.3 billion in 2012. Prior to joining Novellus in 1993, Rick spent 12 years in senior leadership roles at Tektronix and held a range of engineering and management positions with General Electric, Motorola, and Hughes Aircraft.
Loan Hill is a Vietnamese refugee. She earned her degree in computer science from San Jose State University and has worked for several high-tech start-ups, and eventually landed at Novellus Systems in 1990 where she rose to be CIO. Loan and Rick spend most of their time today working in a poor area of Panama on the Caribbean Coast. She is also remodeling a boutique hotel.
In the last few months Loan and Rick have initiated partnership discussions with the UIC to have UIC student organizations and faculty work on service projects that will advance the quality of life for the local population and increase the understanding our students have of the world around them.
Natasha Devroye joined UIC in January 2009. Her research focuses on multi-user information theory, spectrum sharing, wireless communications, and applications of information theory including statistical analysis of hardware security primitives and interpreting learned error correcting codes.
From 2007-2008, she was a lecturer at Harvard University, where she also obtained her PhD. Devroye has been an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory, and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.
She co-chaired the Women in Information Theory Society from 2015-2018, was an Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2019-2021, is an IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors member (2021-2026) and was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2023.
At UIC, she was named a Researcher of the Year in the Rising Star category in 2012, and a University Scholar in 2023. Devroye is a co-PI of the Chicagoland area multi-institution NSF funded Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning Institute.
Devroye and Distinguished Professor Sudip K. Mazumder were among College of Engineering faculty members who received endowed professorships and were honored at an investiture ceremony held October 10. These positions recognize individuals who have had a significant impact on their field through scholarship, creativity, and leadership, and provide dedicated resources for innovative research and teaching.