8/21/2023 Bethan Owen
Professor Ali Ansari is joining the bioengineering department this semester as a teaching assistant professor. To get to know Professor Ansari a little better, we sat down with him to ask him some questions about his academic background and what he hopes to accomplish in the bioengineering department.
Written by Bethan Owen
Professor Ali Ansari is a UIUC alumnus, a device aficionado, and a game lover, with a background in a multitude of different engineering emphases. He’s also joining the bioengineering department this semester as a teaching assistant professor.
To get to know Professor Ansari a little better, we sat down with him to ask him some questions about his academic background and what he hopes to accomplish in the bioengineering department.
What are your academic interests and areas of expertise?
I earned my undergraduate degree at Southern Methodist University in Texas, followed by completing my master's and PhD degrees here at the UIUC bioengineering department. My expertise is mostly in surface chemistry, microfluidics, and cancer research, but I’ve really bounced around between several different engineering fields.
I started by getting my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, followed by a transition to bioengineering for my other two degrees. My postdoctoral career started with a focus on drug delivery research, and then went into some polymer chemistry. That’s about the time when I started focusing on cancer research. After that, I changed labs completely to do tissue engineering, followed by some polymer chemistry and microfluidics.
I really swung from field to field, but the through line of all these experiences was that interacting with undergraduate and graduate students was always my favorite part of the work–that’s why I came back as teaching faculty.
What made you want to return to UIUC specifically?
The academic environment! That, and I really wanted to give back to the professors here. I’m still close with a lot of people here, and my experience at UIUC gave me a lot of insight into how to think about problems and how to learn. For example, I learned how to take advantage of resources, and how to give students access to those resources and teach them how to use them themselves. All of these soft skills were outside the curriculum, but were really important to my education. Those are things that I'd like to give to other students; the ability to solve problems using information that they may not have every single piece of yet. I look forward to showing them the way to find those missing puzzle pieces so they can complete their picture.
What classes are you teaching?
Right now I am teaching BIOE 100, Bioengineering Seminar, as well as co-teaching BIOE 400 with Professor Holly Golecki. That’s the undergraduate level of the M.Eng. capstone project and it is super, super cool. Next semester I’ll be teaching BIOE 205, Signals and Systems, and BIOE 120, Introduction to Bioengineering.
What projects are you working on right now?
I am currently not doing any research proper. However, when I was teaching at Bucknell University, I would have my students play their favorite song into the computer so MATLAB could analyze it and report what the harmonics were. It would describe the frequencies of sound so that students could have a visual representation of the harmonics. A lot of times when we teach harmonics, we just throw math at the students. But with this MATLAB program they could identify what the fundamental frequency was, and why it sounds so pretty. I’d love to write a paper about it as well as other active learning techniques and how they can teach students these high level concepts in a fun, engaging way.
What do you like to do outside of work?
So many things. I love games–I love playing video games, going to different kinds of game shops, card shops, and just playing all different kinds of games. I watch anime. I love going to conferences. I always try to keep track of some of the newer tech and a lot of different kinds of science advances, like microfluidics.
What are you most looking forward to about this position?
I want to be a resource for the students. Solving a problem in research is like completing a puzzle. And it's really fun! I love puzzles. But having a student solve the puzzle is an order of magnitude more enjoyable. Professors and teachers are the ones who can give them the tools to solve these puzzles. That’s why I like to teach. I’d love to be a role model or a mentor for as many different students as I can.