Dr. Rajni Patel received the Ph.D. 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 a cross appointment in the Department of Surgery in the Schulich School Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Dr. Patel also serves as Director of Engineering for Canadian Surgical Technologies & Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), a research program of the London Health Sciences Centre and the Lawson Health Research Institute.
Dr. Patel has published more than 460 papers in refereed journals and conferences in the areas of robotics/mechatronics (including applications in surgery and therapy, rehabilitation and other neurological movement disorders, and space applications), haptics and teleoperation, systems and control, artificial neural networks and intelligent systems. He has co-authored a textbook and 7 research monographs on robotics and control, edited a volume (Volume 1 of 4) on Minimally Invasive Surgical Robotics for the Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics, and co-edited an IEEE Press Reprint Book on Numerical Linear Algebra Techniques for Systems and Control. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Canadian Academy of Engineering, Life Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of ASME (USA), IET (UK), and EIC (Canada).
Dr. Patel has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the Journal of Medical Robotics Research and Automatica (the Journal of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)), and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario, Canada.