Sorrells to join Electrical & Systems Engineering in fall 2024
Janet Sorrells joins McKelvey Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Janet Sorrells will join the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering as an assistant professor in August 2024.
Sorrells is expected to earn a doctorate in bioengineering in July from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also earned a master’s degree in bioengineering in 2020. She earned a bachelor’s in biomedical engineering from the University of Rochester in 2018.
Sorrells works in the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory with Stephen Boppart, professor and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UIUC. Her doctoral thesis focuses on various hardware and software improvements for label-free nonlinear optical microscopy to enable faster and higher-throughput imaging. Part of the work has been developing the SPEED (Single- and multi-photon PEak Event Detection) algorithm to enable the fastest-ever single-detector photon counting in fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy, for which she received the 2023 Illinois Innovation Award. She also is a member of the Center for Optical Molecular Imaging (COMI), a collaboration between the Biophotonics Imaging Lab and GSK, where she contributes to nonlinear optical microscopy system development.
She has been a teaching assistant for five different courses, has mentored multiple undergraduate and graduate students, and has taught STEM at a summer camp in Shanghai. She also has volunteered at two science museums and has shared her research with the nonacademic community through talks and lab tours.
Sorrells has received various fellowships and awards for her research, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
