John R. Hetling is an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Bioengineering and Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. He is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Bioengineering and the Director of the Neural Engineering Vision Laboratory at UIC, and Chief Science Officer of RetMap, Inc. At UIC, Hetling developed the first undergraduate course track in Neural Engineering, and in 2008, he and his students authored a widely accepted definition of the field.