6/9/2025 Phillip Kisubika
Written by Phillip Kisubika
The Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is taking another step forward in its educational mission, and it has one of its most prominent faculty to thank for it.
The Neil and Carol Ruzic Professorship, the first named professorship originating specifically from this department, is being established to honor the parents of professor emeritus David Ruzic.
“We can direct this towards a plasma-related faculty in our department, the very thing that I've helped initiate and build,” David Ruzic said. “This is a way to have it continue going strong."
David and his wife, Marilyn, were on hand recently to sign paperwork with the University of Illinois Foundation, along with UIF President/CEO James Moore, Jr., Illinois Grainger Engineering Associate Dean Philippe Geubelle, and Rizwan Uddin, professor and head of the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering.
“The Neil and Carol Ruzic Professorship will support excellence in scholarship, enhance the department’s visibility, and further our mission to lead in plasma engineering education and innovation,” said Uddin.
“We are deeply grateful to David and his family for this opportunity to honor the Ruzics’ legacy in a way that will benefit generations of students and researchers.”
Neil Ruzic passed away in 2004 at age 74 having written 12 books, founding four magazines, developing an island in the Bahamas now known as “Coco Cay” and doing many other amazing things. His last book, Racing to a Cure, was a memoir detailing the search for new biotherapies in cancer treatment while encouraging others to research, question, and become self-advocates for their own treatments.
After being diagnosed with one of the most aggressive forms of cancer in mantle cell lymphoma and given only about six months to live, his doctors wanted to put him into chemotherapy, but Neil resisted because while it might give him a few more months of life, it had no chance of a cure.
“Being a scientific journalist, he figured there had to be people working on this across the country or world,” David Ruzic said in an interview with Carle Illinois College of Medicine. “So he threw himself into the research, being his own patient advocate and did discover people working on this and got into trials and other things, and while I’d love to say he became cancer free, he was certainly able to do some of these modern therapies and live another six years in really good quality of life.”
Before Carol’s death earlier this year, she and David worked to create the Neil and Carol Ruzic Carle Illinois College of Medicine Fund. Carol earned degrees in journalism and education and worked as a teacher before devoting her life to civic and conservation efforts in the couple’s longtime hometown of Beverly Shores, IN.
David, a longtime Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering himself, has spent over four decades teaching, researching, and growing the study of plasma physics and engineering at Illinois. While this named professorship is emanating from his parents’ estate, he said he hopes that it will establish and extend his own heritage at the university and in this department.
“In helping build the plasma area in our department, I was the one that really pushed to get the word ‘plasma’ into our department’s name,” David said. “I've designed many of the plasma courses that we now teach and I've taught most of them myself at some point. Recently we've established this new Master of Engineering in Plasma Engineering program. I think I've had a big hand in creating and helping build our plasma efforts at this university, and this is a way for that legacy to continue even if I'm not here.”