Professor Shannon remembered with celebration of life, work

 

MechSE celebrated the life and work of Professor Mark A. Shannon (1955-2012) on Thursday, June 18, with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque and painting outside MEB’s Micro/Nano Mechanical Systems (MNMS) Laboratory, of which he was the founding director. 

Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Ilesanmi Adesida, College of Engineering Dean Andreas Cangellaris, and MechSE Department Head Placid Ferreira all attended the celebration, along with about 60 faculty and staff from the department. 

“Mark was a great guy and a great friend of mine—we worked very closely together. He was about service; he put the university before himself, and I saw him do this many times. He helped Mechanical Science and Engineering see itself in a new light—in nano-scale technology. The excellence in that area that we have today is because of what Mark did many years ago. He left a mark of excellence, a mark of friendship, and a mark of placing other people and the institution before himself,” said Adesida.

Shannon’s wife Mona, along with their sons, Neal, Robert, and Davis, were also present to celebrate the commemoration.

“One of the things that really drew Mark to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the collaborative nature of the science and engineering here. We had no idea that it was a smorgasbord of all-you-could-learn, all-you-could-collaborate-on, all-you-could-know. And that’s what it was to him. And the most amazing thing about Mark wasn’t just his vision of the problems and how to put science and engineering to solve those problems, but he looked at people and he saw people’s strengths,” said Mona.

Shannon was a scientist and engineer who took on some of our grandest challenges, contributing significantly to the fields of water purification and desalination, micro-fabrication, medicine, and energy production. He had incredible passion for his work, whether he was teaching students or testifying before Congress. Through his boundless energy and tenacity, he was able to attract colleagues from across campus and around the world to share his vision and work to solve society’s problems.

He had the foresight to realize that micro- and nano-scale sciences would become an integral part of the mechanical engineering discipline. He single-handedly founded and equipped the unique MNMS lab that has been so immensely beneficial to the department.

After receiving his BS, MS, and PhD degrees from UC Berkeley, Shannon joined the University of Illinois in 1994 and became a full professor in 2004. After being named a Kritzer Faculty Scholar in 2003 and a Willett Faculty Scholar in 2004, he was appointed the James W. Bayne Professor in 2006. Throughout his career, he greatly advanced nanoscale, microscale, and mesoscale science and technologies that address real-world problems.

Many of his notable contributions came as director of the Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems—the WaterCAMPWS—and as the director of the MNMS Laboratory. He made it his mission to bring attention to the impending problems associated with the world’s highly vulnerable fresh water resources. Shannon gained an international reputation as a leading expert in water purification research through his numerous talks and keynote lectures on the topic. He received multiple teaching and research awards and honors, including nominations for Water Technology of the Year at the 2009 Global Waters Conference in Zurich, Switzerland, and was appointed to the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board Environmental Engineering Committee. 

In 2009, Shannon was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Despite battling this debilitating disease’s effects, he continued to teach and hold office hours for students up until his final days, to the amazement of all around him. Colleagues said he had a passion for “advancing the state of knowledge” in science and technology and teaching his students how to do the same.