Dr Patel graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics from the University of Liverpool and then was granted a PhD from the University of Cambridge in England. He held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Cambridge, then a Swedish Institute Scholarship at Lund University of Technology, Sweden, and a National Research Council (USA) Research Associateship at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. He is currently a Professor and holds a Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Western Ontario. Prior to that he was with Oklahoma State University and Concordia University. With this wide-ranging background as a researcher and scholar, Dr.Patel has become a well-known personality in the robotics and mechatronics field. He now has numerous grants, contracts and publications to his credit. He has a strong record of collaborative research with industry and government organizations. His key research work involved the design, construction and real-time control of single- and dual-arm redundant manipulators, trajectory and task planning, obstacle avoidance and force control for space robotics. Dr. Patel and his group provided valuable technology transfer to Bombardier Inc. and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) in these areas through CSA’s STEAR (Strategic Technlogies in Automation and Robotics) program over a ten-year period. This has enabled CSA to demonstrate advanced capability in redundant manipulator operation and control on CSA’s Automation and Robotics Testbed (CART) located in St. Hubert, Quebec.

To add to this highly advanced work but in a completely separate environment, Dr. Patel has been appointed Director of Engineering for Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), a multidisciplinary research initiative at the London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, dedicated to the development and application of robotic technology for surgery and therapy. Dr. Patel recently gave an invited presentation on “Robotics in Minimally Invasive Surgery” at the annual meeting of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. For his contributions to robotics and control systems, Dr. Patel has received honours from a number of engineering organizations such as Fellow of IEEE (USA), Fellow of IEE (UK), Fellow of ASME (USA). We can now add Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada to this list.

Ladies and gentlemen, and Madam President – Dr. Rajni Patel