Dr. Harley T. Johnson is the Executive Director and CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. He is a Founder Professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2001. From 2019-2024, he served as the Associate Dean for Research in The Grainger College of Engineering where he oversaw and supported the $320M annual research portfolio in Engineering at UIUC. In this role, he led corporate relations and oversaw all major engineering partnerships with the federal funding agencies.
As a researcher, Johnson’s work focuses on electronic and quantum materials, addressing the role of defects and deformation in their functional properties. He is the PI and Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC), an $18M NSF center (2023-2029) focused on fundamental research in electronic, ionic and quantum materials. In 2019 he founded the NSF “DIGI-MAT” Center on Materials and Data Science, based in UIUC’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He received the NSF CAREER Award, the ASME Thomas J. R. Hughes Young Investigator Award and is a former Fulbright US Scholar. Johnson has also received university recognitions for his leadership in diversity, for outstanding faculty leadership, and, in 2021, he received the university Presidential Medallion for his leadership efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is a Fellow of ASME and a Fellow of the Society of Engineering Science (SES). He received his graduate degrees from Brown University and his undergraduate degree from Georgia Tech.
