Faculty Users
From openmichigan
Contents |
Sample Faculty Profiles
The following are profiles of 3 faculty members who would be typical users of this tool. The profiles consist of a short biography, a list of broad tasks capturing the steps faculty take to create and publish content. These will be used in user scenarios depicting how the tool will assist the faculty to accomplish their goals.
Elof Ljung: Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Michigan
Dr Ljung received his M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering in 1981 and the Ph. D. degree in solid state electronics in 1987, both from the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1981, he joined the Department of Solid State Electronics, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. There, in 1990, he became an associate professor heading the silicon sensor research group.
In 1991, Dr. Ljung was appointed professor at University of Michigan, where he heads the Microsystem Technology group at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in the College of Engineering. His research is devoted to microsystem technology based on micro-machining of silicon. The works spans over a broad range of technological and application fields such as medical technology, biochemistry, biotechnology, microfluidics, optical applications, wafer-level packaging and device integration. Some of the results have successfully been commercialized.
Between 2001 and 2005 he was a member of the International Steering Committee of the Conference series IEEE Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) and he was General Co-Chair of that conference in 2006. Since 2003, Dr. Ljung has been a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE/ASME "Journal of Microelectromechnical Systems". He has published more than 300 research journal and conference papers and has more than 15 patents proposals or granted patents. Dr. Ljung is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA) and he is an IEEE Fellow.
Tasks:
Part of Dr Ljung's interest in being on an editorial board is the liberal, but responsible, dissemination of the latest research to foster innovation in his field. Apart from normal publishing channels, Dr Ljung has been maintaining a website where he makes available to his students and the general public interesting papers and developing results either his own or with the permission of his colleagues. The process for him looks like this:
- Identify an interesting piece of information that he would like to share
- Request for permission from the proper parties (owners) to publish on his site.
- If the information is a result of UM funded research, he needs clearance from the Office of Technology Transfer as well to make sure there is no capital potential being lost by his actions.
- Format the material as needed and place it on his website.
Elaine McPhearson: Assistant Professor, Department of Infectious Diseases, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Dr. McPhearson graduated in 1999 with her M.D. from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL. During her time there she entered the global health program, working on public health research at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Her research focused on expanding national capacity to address the public health and scientific challenges of the evolving HIV and TB epidemic in Uganda. This work led to a fellowship research position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland starting in 2002. Working on a small team, she researched prevention techniques for HIV/AIDS, specifically antiretroviral therapy to reduce the transmission of HIV.
In 2005, Dr. McPhearson was hired as an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. While much of her time is devoted to researching HIV transmission, Dr. McPhearson is also an engaging lecturer with a focus of providing medical students with a solid foundation in the medical sciences.
Tasks:
Although Dr. McPhearson is a sound educator to her own students, she is somewhat of an egotist about her own research and findings. Already jaded, she has deep reservations about the University's copyright policies and demands that she retain all copyrights to the materials she publishes and teaches. Dr. McPhearson typically creates her own lecture materials, often meticulously designing graphs and charts representing her research findings on HIV transmission. Her process for assembling content for teaching:
- Compile a list of basic ID principles - foundational components.
- Build these principles out with concrete examples from field work and research.
- Design complex graphs and charts to represent findings and examples.
- Submit course materials to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to be uploaded to a centralized learning management system.
- Makes adjustments to materials throughout the lectures, and uploads those changes to the learning management system.
Akinyi Moikeena: Professor, College of Health Sciences, University of Nairobi
Dr Moikeena was born in Nakuru, Kenya in 1960. After a stint at the College of Health Sciences in Nairobi, she accepted a scholarship to the University of Birmingham where she completed a degree in Bio Science and obtained a PhD from their School of Medicine where her research was on mitochondrial diabetes. Upon completion of her studies, Dr Moikeena accepted an associate professorship offer from her alma mater in Nairobi. In 1999, she attained the rank of a full professor and in the following year took leadership of the medical education board, which is responsible for directing and shaping the training of medical students in Kenya.
Dr Moikeena's appointment to the board was a direct result of the special emphasis she placed on how her students learned. On her arrival in Kenya, she recognized the fact that the research she had spent most of her life pursuing was so particular and far removed from the medical problems that her students were facing locally. Determined to keep her students at the cutting edge of medical research, but keeping their education relevant to the medical conditions of Kenya, she introduced and encouraged new forms of acquiring medical knowledge and along with 2 of her colleagues researched and produced a seminal peer-reviewed paper on medical pedagogy that allowed for the inclusion of new medical knowledge without foregoing training for the real needs of the local populace.
Outside her professional life, Dr Moikeena is just as involved in the life of her 3 children and is the treasurer of the local chapter of the fun club of the Harambee Stars -- a position that allows her to indulge both in singing and watching football games: two of her greatest passions next to medicine.
Tasks:
After returning from a medical conference in Singapore, Dr Moikeena realized that some of the educational materials that she had developed for training on local diseases and medical practices would be useful to medical instructors in the developed world just as their cutting edge research was useful to Kenyan students. Partnering with a colleague at the University of Maryland, Dr Moikeena has started preparing her materials for use by her colleague via the Internet. Time and uncertainties about the copyright status of her material have been some of the big issues she gripes with, but here are some of the tasks she undergoes to make her materials available:
- For each topic (e.g. malaria treatment), she creates/adapts a course outline and identifies which materials she needs
- For some of her earlier work, she (or a student who is marginally compensated or not at all) types up her notes and stores it in an electronic version using Microsoft Word. For illustrations, they take a picture and embed the image in the Word document.
- To supplement her materials, Dr Moikeena spends time convincing her colleagues to also hand her their materials - some are reluctant, but her position and assurances of proper attribution seems to sway most over.
- Once a topic area is ready, she emails the documents to her colleague in Maryland who reverts if there are any
questions that come up
