Neil and Carol Ruzic Carle Illinois College of Medicine Fund
Neil and Carol Ruzic Carle Illinois College of Medicine Fund
Established by Carol Ruzic and her son, David Ruzic, the Neil and Carol Ruzic Carle Illinois College of Medicine Fund honors the vision and spirit of Carol’s late husband and David’s father, Neil Ruzic. The fund will be used to provide support to named faculty appointments for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, with appointees holding expertise and academic abilities within the field of engineering medicine.
Along with funding, each recipient will also receive a copy of Neil Ruzic’s book, Racing to a Cure, a Cancer Memoir detailing the search for new biotherapies in cancer treatment while encouraging others to research, question, and become self-advocates for their own treatments.
Health Innovation Professor Wawrzyniec Dobrucki has been named the inaugural Neil and Carol Ruzic Faculty Scholar at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. His expertise is in preclinical molecular imaging, and his professional interests include developing novel targeted multimodal imaging strategies to noninvasively assess tissue microenvironments and various biological processes in vivo, including therapeutic neovascularization, atherosclerosis, neoplastic progression, and cancer response to experimental therapies. Professor Dobrucki will hold this appointment for five years.
He also is an Associate Professor in the Grainger College of Engineering, Bioengineering Department and is the Associate Head of Graduate Programs in Bioengineering. In addition, he holds a full-time faculty position at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where he serves as co-chair for the Integrative Imaging theme and directs the Experimental Molecular Imaging Laboratory (EMIL). Dr. Dobrucki also has affiliations with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Cancer Center at Illinois both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Medical University of Gdansk in Poland.
Faculty:
Wawrzyniec Dobrucki, Inaugural Neil and Carol Ruzic Faculty Scholar