IIT Faculty Members Named Distinguished Professors
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is pleased to announce that faculty members Patrick Corrigan, Darsh Wasan, and Richard Wright have been awarded the title of distinguished professor for exceptional achievement in their fields. The title of distinguished professor is awarded to full-time professors who have achieved preeminence in their fields of expertise, based on their scholarly work and the excellence of their teaching. The faculty members will be honored at the Distinguished Professor Recognition Ceremony, at 4 p.m., Thursday, April 8, in the McCormick Tribune Campus Center Auditorium, 3201 S. State St., Chicago. They will each present a lecture on their work during the ceremony.
Patrick Corrigan
Patrick Corrigan joined IIT’s Institute of Psychology in August 2005, where he currently serves as a professor and associate dean of psychology research. Prior to joining IIT, he worked as a professor of psychiatry and executive director of the University of Chicago Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. He has spent a large part of his career providing and evaluating services for people with psychiatric disabilities and their families. Realizing that the effects of psychiatric rehabilitation are limited by mental illness stigma, Corrigan has broadened his research agenda throughout the last decade to include the prejudice and discrimination of mental illness. His work has been supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for more than ten years, leading to his role as principal investigator in developing and leading the Chicago Consortium for Stigma Research (CCSR). Recently, the Consortium evolved into the National Consortium on Stigma and Empowerment (NCSE), with support from an NIMH developing center grant. The National Consortium includes colleagues from Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers. The current editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation, Corrigan has authored more than 250 journal articles and 10 books. He earned a Psy.D. from Illinois School of Professional Psychology in 1989.
Darsh Wasan
Wasan currently serves IIT as the Motorola chair professor of chemical engineering, the vice president for international affairs, and the acting director of the National Center for Food Safety and Technology (NCFST). He has spent his entire professional career at IIT, where he has previously served as chairman of the chemical engineering department, dean of engineering, vice president for research and technology, and provost and vice president for academic affairs. A highly respected and accomplished researcher, Wasan’s interests lie in the areas of colloidal and interfacial engineering to solve energy, environmental, and food problems. He is the author of more than 400 research publications and the co-author of a textbook on interfacial transport processes. He currently holds 10 U.S. patents. Wasan has received numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Commissioner’s Special Citation for “extraordinary vision and creativity in developing the nation’s first food safety consortium joining government, industry and academia,” the National Center for Food Safety and Technology. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for his “pioneering research, inspirational teaching, and novel technology developments in colloidal processing and interfacial rheology,” and to the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2007.Wasan earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Illinois in 1960, and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1965, both in chemical engineering.
Richard Wright
Prior to joining IIT Chicago-Kent, Richard Wright served as a faculty member of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. He has been a visiting professor, lecturer and/or fellow at the University of Texas School of Law, the University of Melbourne in Australia, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the Universidad Torcuato di Tella Law School in Argentina, and Brasenose College, and the Faculty of Law of the University of Oxford in England. His teaching and research focus on domestic and comparative tort law, jurisprudence, law and economics, and law and artificial intelligence. Wright’s published work, which has reshaped thinking about the nature of causation and the foundations and basic principles of legal responsibility, appears in several international collections of leading scholarship on tort law and legal philosophy. Wright is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has been an active participant in its revision of the Restatement of the Law Third on Torts, including serving as an advisor to the Reporters for the Restatement on Apportionment of Liability. He has also served as a member of the executive committee and as chair of the Section on Torts and Compensation Systems of the Association of American Law Schools. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Center for Justice and Democracy, the Journal of Tort Law, and the Torts, Product Liability and Insurance Law Journal of the Social Science Research Network.
Founded in 1890, IIT is a Ph.D.-granting university with more than 7,300 students in engineering, sciences, architecture, psychology, design, humanities, business and law. IIT's interprofessional, technology-focused curriculum is designed to advance knowledge through research and scholarship, to cultivate invention improving the human condition, and to prepare students from throughout the world for a life of professional achievement, service to society, and individual fulfillment. Visit www.iit.edu.
