Rate My Professor James Patton

James Patton is the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he serves as Department Head of the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering, and a senior research scientist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. He earned Bachelor of Science degrees in mechanical engineering and engineering science from the University of Michigan in 1989, a Master of Science in theoretical mechanics from Michigan State University in 1993, and a PhD in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in 1998. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in rehabilitation robotics at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago from 1998 to 2001, his career includes Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in 2001, Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Sensory-Motor Performance Program at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago from 2001 to 2004, and Associate Director of the Center for Rehabilitation Robotics in 2004. He joined the University of Illinois Chicago as Associate Professor of Bioengineering in 2007, advancing to Professor.

James Patton's research focuses on neurorehabilitation using robotic manipulators and human-machine interfaces to investigate motor learning, neural control of actions, haptics, dynamic balance control, and recovery from brain injuries such as stroke. His laboratory explores how the brain acquires, organizes, and executes motor behaviors through interactions with artificial systems, employing techniques like error augmentation to accelerate skill acquisition in patients. He has directed the National Center for Rehabilitation Robotics and teaches graduate courses in control systems in bioengineering, neural modeling, and problem-based learning. Patton holds editorial positions as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering since 2015, Editor in Chief of the IEEE-EMBS Conference Editorial Board in 2014, and Vice President of Conferences for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Awards include the UIC University Scholar in 2017 and College of Engineering Faculty Advising Award in 2012. Key publications are "Reshaping Movement Distributions With Limit-Push Robotic Training" (IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2018), "Interictal spike connectivity in human epileptic neocortex" (Clinical Neurophysiology, 2018), and "Regression techniques employing feature selection to predict clinical outcomes in stroke" (PLoS ONE, 2018).