The MechSE Department has announced that Professor K. Jimmy Hsia will become the new W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor in Mechanical Engineering. This professorship will become effective August 16, 2014, followed by an official investiture during the Fall 2014 semester.
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The MechSE Department has announced that Professor K. Jimmy Hsia will become the new W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor in Mechanical Engineering. This professorship will become effective August 16, 2014, followed by an official investiture during the Fall 2014 semester.
An Illinois faculty member since 1991, Hsia conducts research on the mechanics of living cells, in addition to his work on the mechanics and mechanisms of creep damage and creep fracture. He has been an associate director of the NSF Science and Technology Center on Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS) since 2010. He also recently served as the University of Illinois Associate Vice Chancellor for Research for New Initiatives.
Hsia holds a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from M.I.T, an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a B.S. in engineering mechanics from Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Wilkins Professorship As an undergraduate in railroad engineering, Grafton Wilkins joined his fellow engineering students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s foundry, where he learned the art and science of precision casting of metal objects. The University of Illinois bookends that he and other students created in the 1920s still turn up on bookshelves from time to time. It may have been fond memories of his foundry experience that motivated him to endow the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professorship.
Born in Marissa, Illinois, Wilkins earned his B.S. in railroad engineering in 1929. An ingenious engineer and astute businessman, he served as president of Universal Castings Corporation in Chicago for many years. He married his wife, Lillian, a St. Louis native, in 1931. They spent most of their married life in La Grange, Illinois, where Mrs. Wilkins was active in civic and philanthropic activities. At one time, she was a member of the University of Illinois Foundation’s Laureate Circle.
Grafton Wilkins died in 1991, and Lillian passed away in 1996. The Wilkins Professorship was received as an estate gift in 1997.