Henry Stark, Ph.D.

Professor Henry Stark served as Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department from 1988 to 1997. He came to IIT from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he was a full-professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and System Engineering. In the 11 years that Professor Stark spent at RPI, he led the research activity in medical imaging and pattern recognition. In 1979 Professor Stark became a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and in 1980 he received a best paper award from the IEEE for "An investigation of Computerized Tomography by Direct Fourier Inversion," which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering in July 1981. He is generally credited with developing the required interpolation to make Fourier reconstruction of computerized tomography possible. More recently Professor Stark has been very active in adapting a method of applied mathematics called convex projections to image processing. His work in this area led to the publication of the book Image Recovery (Academic, 1987) which he edited and contributed to as co-author. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE for his work on medical imaging in 1988.

Prior to his tenure at RPI, Professor Stark spent seven years at Yale first as assistant, then associate professor. During this time he did research on optical image processing and edited the book Applications of Optical Fourier Transforms (Academic, 1981) which was translated into Russian in 1988.

In addition to having published over 100 technical papers, Professor Stark has co-authored several textbooks including Probability, Random Processes, and Estimation Theory for Engineers (with John W. Woods), Prentice-Hall 1986, (2nd ed. 1994) and Modern Electrical Communications, 2nd Edition ( with Franz B. Tuteur and John B. Anderson), Prentice-Hall 1979 (2nd ed. 1988). More recently, he and Prof. Yongyi Yang co-authored the book vector space projections (Wiley, 1998), the first book on applications of projection theory to the solution of engineering problems. Professor Stark has lectured at numerous universities worldwide.