Congratulations to the academic community at the @UofIllinois for a wonderful 20th anniversary event to celebrate the formation of their Department of Bioengineering!  Over this relatively short period, the department has transitioned from a nascent effort launched in 2004 with Bruce Wheeler as the department head and with just two or three full time faculty (notably Rohit Bhargava and Michael Insana), to a world class entity – by many metrics one of the best such programs in the country! I was honored to serve as one of several invited speakers at the event in Champaign to celebrate this occasion, with a talk titled “Frontier Developments in Bioelectronics: Degradable, Wireless Optoelectronics for Electrotherapy,” covering our most recent work on optically programmable polyphasic nerve stimulators and millimeter-scale cardiac pacemakers. My talk also acknowledged my wonderful time on the faculty at UIUC, from 2003 to 2016, with a special shout-out to leaders (@RashidB23819196, Ilesanmi Adesida and @deancangellaris) and collaborators from that time who were not only instrumental in the development of the Department of Bioengineering but also in my own career – interestingly, collected together in September at an annual research symposium at @NUedukz in Astana, Kazakhstan!!  See my other post on this amazing trip. I was also reminded by the current department head, Mark Anastasio, that I was an invited speaker at the 10th anniversary of the department, back in 2014! It was great fun to catch up with former colleagues at UIUC – some of whom such as Taher Saif, Rashid Bashir, Stephen Boppart and others are current collaborators!  Amazing speakers – including @ShanaOKelley, @StephenQuake, @TejalADesai, @SMitragotri, @SamuelAchilefu, Michael Miller, @MayDWang1 on the first day and others on the second day.  Link below to the entire agenda. Thanks to @NieShuming and Mark and others for the invitation! The night before, I had a chance to get together with some amazing former group members who are now stand-out faculty at UIUC – four in four different departments!: Prof. Qing Cao (former PhD student, in materials science and engineering), Prof. @XinNingAero (former postdoc, in aerospace engineering), Prof. @cunjiangyuUIUC (former postdoc, in electrical engineering) and Prof. @Siyi_Xu_ (former undergraduate researcher and postdoc, in mechanical engineering). Finally, thanks to Xin for a tour of his labs – amazing facilities, and powerful, unique set-ups for testing of materials and structures in simulated conditions of outer space! linkedin.com/posts/profjohna… bioengineering.illinois.edu/…