Ashfaq Khokhar began his appointment as the Palmer Department Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering in January 2017. Khokhar was previously chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology since 2013. Before that, he was a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Khokhar was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE) Fellow in 2009.
Khokhar’s research centers on context-aware wireless networks, computational biology, health care data mining, content-based multimedia modeling, retrieval and multimedia communication and high-performance algorithms. He is considered a leading expert in the area of high-performance solutions for multimedia applications, especially those that are data or communication intensive. He has contributed to five edited volumes and co-authored nine book chapters, 53 publications in archival journals, and 158 refereed conference papers. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the United States Army, the Department of Homeland Security and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Khokhar earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, Pakistan; his master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University; and his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California.
The title Palmer Department Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering began as the Palmer Professorship, established in 1986 through a $1 million gift from Barbara and James Palmer who both graduated from Iowa State in the 1940s, with James earning a degree in electrical engineering. In 2010, that professorship was expanded to the chair position with additional earnings from the endowed faculty position.