Dr. Rajni Patel

Biography:

This year's McNaughton Award winner, Dr. Rajni Patel, received the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge, England in 1973 and currently holds the position of Distinguished University Professor and Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with cross appointments in the Department of Surgery and the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at Western University.  Dr. Patel is a founding member of CSTAR (Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics), a research centre for surgical robotics at the London Health Sciences Centre, and serves as its Director of Engineering.

Dr. Patel has over 35 years of research experience in the design, simulation, prototyping and control of advanced robotic and mechatronic systems.  He has also made significant contributions to the development and application of intelligent (neural-network based) control techniques, and computational and robustness issues in control system design.   From 1991 to 2000, Dr. Patel collaborated with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Bombardier Inc. on three of CSA’s Strategic Technologies in Automation and Robotics (STEAR) programs.  Since 2000, Dr. Patel’s research has focused on robotic and other mechatronic applications in minimally invasive surgery and therapy, haptics and teleoperation, and surgical training and skills assessment, and more recently on applications for stroke rehabilitation, Parkinson’s Disease and other neurological movement disorders.  He has published over 500 refereed journal and conference papers, 16 book chapters, and 10 books and monographs.

Dr. Patel is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).  He has served on the editorial boards of several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.