Atam Dhawan, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and interim dean of the Albert Dorman Honors College, was selected to represent the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society as a 2012-2013 Distinguished Lecturer to travel worldwide providing lectures about advances today in medicine and technology.    In December, he was a special guest lecturer at Cornell University. 

Dhawan is best known among engineering peers as the inventor of an important innovation for an instrument commonly used to detect skin cancer--the nevoscope. The optical transillumination technology developed by Dhawan was also commercialized into a line of vein visualization products, Veinlite.

Currently, Dhawan is involved in the development of a multi-spectral optical and near-infrared tissue imaging technology to measure and monitor glucose levels in the blood non-invasively without painful pricking to get a drop of blood as required by conventional glucose monitors.

Dhawan is the founder and executive director of the Interdisciplinary Design Studio at NJIT, a unique, enhanced undergraduate research program focused on teaching students a roadmap of innovation to entrepreneurship, where students develop innovative ideas of commercial products, designs or services with high-potential impact under a streamlined curriculum, faculty advising and industry mentoring over three and a half years.

Prior to joining NJIT in 2000,  Dhawan held faculty positions in electrical and computer engineering and in the radiology departments at the University of Houston, University of Cincinnati, University of Texas, University of Texas Medical Center (Dallas) and University of Toledo.   He is the former chair of NJIT’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Dhawan has published more than 200 research articles in refereed journals, books, and conference proceedings. His current research interests are medical imaging, multi-modality medical image analysis, adaptive learning and pattern recognition. His research work has been funded by NIH, NSF and several industries.

He is a recipient of the Martin Epstein Award (1984), National Institutes of Health FIRST Award (1988), Sigma-Xi Young Investigator Award (1992), University of Cincinnati Faculty Achievement Award (1994), the prestigious IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Early Career Achievement Award (1995), and the University of Toledo Doermann Distinguished Lecture Award (1999).

He is senior editor of IEEE Transactions of Biomedical Engineering and editor-in-charge of IEEE TBME Letters and has overseen the publication of special issues in healthcare technologies. He is the conference chair of the IEEE International Conference on Point-of-Care Healthcare Technologies to be held in Bangalore, India in January 2013. Since 2009, he has served as the chair of the “Emerging Technologies Committee” of the IEEE-EMB Society that he also served during 1997-99.

He has served on many IEEE EMBS professional committees and has delivered Workshops on Intelligent Biomedical Image Analysis in IEEE EMBS International Conferences (1996, 1997, 2000, 2003). He was chair of the “New Frontiers in Biomedical Engineering” Symposium at the World Congress 2000 on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. He was the conference chair of the 2006 IEEE 28th International Conference of Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. He served as American Liaison and EMBS Representative for the steering committee of the International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging (2009-11). He has chaired numerous NIH review panels. Currently he chairs the NIH Chartered Study Section on Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics.

Dhawan, who is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Roorkee, Roorkee, India. He was a Canadian Commonwealth Fellow at University of Manitoba, where he completed his doctorate in the same field with specializations in medical imaging and image analysis.