Rohit Bhargava serves as the Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a primary academic appointment as Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering and Professor of Bioengineering. He graduated with a B.Tech. dual-degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi and received a doctoral degree from Case Western Reserve University. After postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, he has been at Illinois as a faculty member.
Bhargava is recognized as a pioneer in the field of chemical imaging and its applications to histopathology. Advances from his laboratory have established the theory, state of the art instrumentation, analytical workflows and applications of this emerging technology, some of which have been commercially translated. Using artificial intelligence techniques, his work focuses on enabling all-digital, chemical histopathology for augmenting diagnoses and decision-making. He has also served to connect the research community in new and exciting ways. Bhargava was one of the first external hires in the Illinois Bioengineering department, founded the Cancer Scholars Program and started the NIH T32-supported tissue microenvironment training program. He founded and continues to lead the Cancer Center at Illinois - a basic cancer center at the convergence of science, engineering and oncology.