Ali Ansari

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• Prof. Ansari's Home Page

Education

• Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Southern Methodist University, 2012
• Doctor of Philosophy in Bioengineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2018
• Master in Science in Bioengineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2016

Biography

I am a first generation Pakistani American who is the son of a doctor as many of us are. I was originally entranced by the puzzle like nature of engineering, but found my way the long way round into bioengineering and have never truly left. I was trained in Electrical Engineering with a biomed focus at Southern Methodist University, and then moved to Illinois here to do my Masters. During my second semester, I joined the Imoukhuede Lab as a masters student and then joined as a PhD student staying here and doing science until I graduated in 2018. After that I did my postdoc at Case Western University where I did research in a variety of areas, finding them all so very interesting and building my foundation of the kind of faculty that I wanted to be. Throughout all the experiences and projects that I worked on, the commonality was my desire to mentor and teach, which I realized that I enjoyed so much, that I would like to focus on it solely. I was hired by Bucknell as a Visiting Assistant Professor, and was able to help them with both Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. I also was able to find that I was able apply many of the different activities that I was learning to my students and was able to test and assess my results in real time with the students. After doing that, I was able to come back (home) to UIUC where I am currently Assistant Teaching faculty here.

Academic Positions

• Assistant Teaching Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Bioengineering, 2023-2026)
• Visting Assistant Professor, Bucknell University, Bioengineering/Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2021-2023)

Professional Registrations

• Theta Tau General Member (Former)
• AICHE General Member (Former)
• IEEE General Member (Former)
• SPIEE General Member
• BED General Member
• Biomedical Engineering Society General Member
• ASEE General Member

Teaching Statement

In my experience, the best educators create both inclusive and accessible environments where the students feel comfortable and increase their exposure to a variety of complementary methodologies to help them learn. Using multiple different teaching styles helps keep core concepts much more engaging as well as interesting and helps to solidify their overall understanding. It also makes it easier to ground fundamental knowledge in real-world context to help students better understand why the concepts are important. I strive to bring this perspective to the classes I teach in both lecture and laboratory environments, as my goal is to help students internalize complex concepts and adapt them to the diverse problems they will face in their future careers. By guiding students through projects that require them to look at current limitations and solutions with which our field struggles, and by promoting collaborations between students of different scientific backgrounds, I wish to promote multifaceted approaches to developing a strong theoretical understanding of the principles of bioengineering. Project based learning can be integrated into curricula as to also enable students to add their own interests into the course material and ingrain that knowledge much more efficiently. I hope this approach will prepare the next generation to address unmet needs in this evolving discipline. It is with this core concept in mind that I designed the BMEG 471/671 Art of Surface Functionalization elective course, one of many that I had the honor of designing and teaching this past year at Bucknell University. The intent was to develop a dynamic lecture program that integrated fundamental concepts and diverse real-world applications seamlessly, enabling students to be active participants in the learning process. I think that structuring classes in this way and using projects rather than tests as summative assignments gives students a sense of ownership of the material and improves long-term information retention.

Multifaceted learning is one of the advantages of fields such as bioengineering, as it sits at the intersection between numerous disciplines. Understanding aspects of each of these adjoining fields can thus help strengthen our research and unlock problem-solving faculties as bioengineers. Additionally, the multiple fields and perspectives that we can use in the course unlocks the opportunity to be able to play with the materials in a much less formal way. Less formality allows students to play with their lessons and learn in a low stakes environment the concepts that they need to develop mastery of the overall skills. This also lowers the barrier for students who may have a lower initial mastery of the material and allow them to improve with less fear of failure. An example of which are the labs that I developed for BMEG 220, a sophomore level MATLAB modeling course. In this class, the creation of “puzzles and games” were used as a way of teaching complex coding concepts for the students to understand. By creating word searches, ciphers, crosswords, and even sudoku puzzles, MATLAB was made to be less intimidating and more accessible for students. They then used this mastery and knowledge to build their own functional MATLAB models which spanned from looking at economic problems regarding minimum wages, to complex biological ones involving the efficacy of anti-cancer therapeutics. The ability to apply this knowledge and contextualize it in a multifaceted approach allowed for the students to better understand its impact and power, as well as individualize the experience.

Teaching Experience

From my own life experience, I was originally trained as an Electrical Engineer with a specialty in biomedical engineering at a liberal arts university, Southern Methodist University, which was a fusion of the required courses for premedical students as well as the electrical engineering track courses. I then joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Master’s student and ultimately doctoral candidate in bioengineering focusing on research using basic principles of fluid dynamics and surface chemistry to build microfluidic devices for sorting and isolating cells. My teaching experiences include teaching as a TA for courses ranging from Systems Biology to Conservation Principles in Bioengineering at UIUC. At Bucknell as well as the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, I have had experience mentoring a team for Senior Design for Biomedical Engineers and I have also been honored to teach three courses thus far in the Biomedical Engineering Department as well as one in the Electrical Engineering Department. One such course in BMEG was an elective course in the Art of Surface Chemistry, which is a BMEG 471/671 undergraduate and graduate level class. I was also honored by inheriting the BMEG 350 Fundamentals of Signals and Systems course as well as the BMEG 220 Introduction to Scientific Computing in which I wrote and created all the puzzle labs completely from scratch. I would enjoy teaching classes on material and surface functionalization as well as on microfluidics as those pertain to my doctoral research most prominently. I can also give lectures on core concepts in the field as I was given an extremely broad education in many different fields and can teach courses in chemistry, biology, or electrical engineering as it pertains to the context in which biomedical engineering intersects with it. As I have had experience teaching Signals in BMEG 350 at Bucknell in the biomedical engineering spaces, ECEG 270 at Bucknell which is signals and systems in electrical engineering spaces, and BIOE 205 at UIUC which is the bioengineering version of the signals course, Computer Modeling in BMEG 220,Circuits and Instrumentation in ECEG 351 at Bucknell, and BIOE 414 at UIUC, and a Surface Chemistry in BMEG 470 level elective, as well as introductory courses in BIOE 100 and BIOE 120 at UIUC, I would feel extremely confident teaching those classes again, and improving upon my previous experience using the feedback that I received from the student’s midsemester/end of semester feedbacks upon course design and pacing. As I have always strived to improve and am a lifelong learner, I also look forward to growing with my students as I become a more effective teacher. As part of that growth and desire to keep learning, I have thoroughly appreciated and taken advantage of the New Faculty Lecture Series that the Teaching and Learning Center at Bucknell University as well as the Collins Scholar Program that UIUC has created and have learned and implemented a great deal of new active learning techniques such as think pair share and role playing to better improve the experiences of my students.

In addition to these experiences, I have taught courses for high school students for the ResearcHStart program as well as the numerous Summer Mentorship Programs at Illinois such as Nano@illinois, Summer RET, and NSF REUs. During my time at Illinois, I led several mini workshops for each of these summer programs on using and modifying instrumentations that could help them monitor and modulate bioengineered systems. Thus, I can teach experimental techniques such as cell culture, microscopy, microfluidic device fabrication, and biochemical surface functionalization, and feel confident in leading lab sections and teaching lecture-based classes. I would be very excited to continue doing that to help bolster the already rich and expansive list of classes in the Bioengineering catalog.

Awards and Mentorship

These experiences helped instill in me a passion for teaching and that critical moment where the light in their eyes changes when a student understands a difficult concept drives me to dedicate my career to training the next generation of bioengineers as a member of the teaching faculty. In each of the classes I taught at Illinois and here at Bucknell, my student evaluations were consistently high as well as receiving the Research Memorandum Excellent TA Ranking in both Spring 2014 as well as Spring 2017, as well as the Award for Exemplary Mentorship for the 2015 Nano@illinois REU at UIUC. As a graduate student, I served as a mentor for numerous undergraduates that assisted with research in the Imoukhuede Lab. I was honored to teach a dozen undergraduates, a third of whom went on to pursue graduate level education at the PhD or Master’s level, and the rest of whom are pursuing a range of industry positions in bioengineering. Teaching these students and seeing their love of learning and education was truly what inspired me to become a better teacher. As a teaching faculty member here at the University of Illinois, I have been honored with Excellent teacher ratings for every year that I have taught thus far, which is a feat that I feel I must continue to try to repeat for my students.

Additionally, as my goal has always been to increase representation and serve as a role model and mentor to the community, I have been nominated and have agreed to serve as the faculty advisor to the Muslim Student Association at Bucknell as their liaison to the rest of campus. It is my hope that I can both inspire and educate students of many different backgrounds as I serve in this position as well as a professor. I have found that the experience of teaching students to be the most rewarding part of my graduate and postdoctoral tenure and hope to serve as an excellent mentor and guide to the next generation of bioengineers as they tackle some of the grand challenges that face our world. As my own experiences were so positive, empowering, and impactful, I wish to pay that forward and help create that same environment for the countless future students who train as bioengineers.

Course Development

• BIOE 414: Biomedical Instrumentation SP 2024
• BIOE 400: Senior Design Capstone FA 2023, SP 2024
• BIOE 205: Signals and Systems in Bioengineering SP 2024, SP 2025, SP 2026
• BIOE 120: Introduction to Bioengineering SP 2024, SP 2025, FA NM 2025 SP 2026
• BIOE 100: Introduction to Bioengineering FA 2023, FA 2024, FA 2025

Research Statement

My doctoral research was focused on two major aspects. The first was the creation of a surface functionalization schema which could allow for customizable targeting of a cell type from a mixed samples of cells and the subsequent capture to a chemical surface. This isolated cell could then be released from the capture surface by interacting with a secondary anchor, which then would allow for the cell to be released while keeping the number of cell expression altering processes minimized. We then took this static platform and applied it to microfluidic devices which could then improve the throughput and the design of the overall schema. By integrating the capture surface with microfluidics we could show isolation of specific cancer cells from a mixed population and were able to show release of these cells to have their receptors quantified using quantitative flow cytometry. We compared the receptor quantification to make sure that there were only minimal differences between the released cells and cells that were not exposed to the microfluidic isolation to validate the receptor numbers and the authenticity of the isolation keeping those receptor numbers consistent.

My postdoctoral research projects have spanned many different fields of expertise. I have published many different review papers of which two were first author and regarded material science and chemistry more than the cancer or microfluidics elements. In them, I focused on developing surfaces to capture and isolate cells to better improve personalized or precision medicine, rather than focusing explicitly on cancer as the main application, as one of the greatest advantages of material science applications in biomedical engineering is that it can be applied to any branch of our field from tissue engineering, to imaging to biosensing, and even drug testing and drug delivery. In that sense, we focused on developing reproducible methods of capturing and isolating cells but also in general the advantages for altering surfaces with this kind of chemistry. I also have one Journal of Visualized Experiments protocol paper which shows the basis of our SATCR surface functionalization isolation schema. In addition to that, I am first author on two research papers regarding our isolation technique as well as a contributing author on two to three more papers that have recently been published in the Tissue Engineering and Systems Biology field as well, in which I conducted experiments and helped write sections of the manuscript. I am also an author on a few posters for graduate student presentations at BMES as well due to my work at Case Western Reserve University in Drug Delivery and Polymer Chemistry. In each of those, my expertise in functionalization and altering material surfaces for microfluidics and cell interfaces enabled a way of integrating additional functionality into more static substrates and platforms.

My current research is quite a bit of a departure from this in terms of focus but not in rigor. As all of these previous experiences have taught me, research is solving a puzzle and figuring out which pieces are important and where they fit. My current focus is in teaching and figuring out how to bestow puzzle pieces to other students so that they may complete their own puzzles. This is a little more difficult and complex than doing it oneself, as I can know very quickly which puzzle pieces I don't own myself, but I don't always know which ones others have and how familiar they are with them. In this vein, I have focused on creating activities to allow students to play and familiarize themselves with their own knowledge and work on applying these lessons to the different types of puzzles that they may have in terms of problems and tests. I think that project based learning is one of the best ways to teach students and allow them to play in a sandbox with lower stakes for failure, and it is something that I am working towards.

In terms of publications and assessments, I have an IRB that allows me to collect data from students on the types of learning activities that I am trying and I am compiling those in hopes of improving the curriculum. Once I am able to analyze the data and find some trends that are consistent across the semesters that I am teaching it, I can start to publish on them.

Research Interests

• Cancer
• Curriculum Mapping and Course Design
• Accessibility/Universal Design
• Active Learning
• Game Based Learning

Research Topics

• Research in BME Education

Selected Articles in Journals

• J. Mann, A. Ansari, W. L. Chang, C. Cvetkovic, H. Golecki, and R. Hajj, “Y(Our) story: A collaborative autoethnographic reflection of a faculty community of practice to promote equity-oriented engineering education,” 2025 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Jun. 2025.
• Ansari, Ali, et al. “Cell isolation via spiral microfluidics and the secondary anchor targeted cell release system.” AIChE Journal, vol. 65, no. 12, 6 Nov. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1002/aic.16844.
• Watson, Craig, et al. “Multiplexed microfluidic chip for Cell co-culture.” The Analyst, vol. 147, no. 23, 2022, pp. 5409–5418, https://doi.org/10.1039/d2an01344d.
• Mamer, S.B., Page, P., Murphy, M. et al. The Convergence of Cell-Based Surface Plasmon Resonance and Biomaterials: The Future of Quantifying Bio-molecular Interactions—A Review. Ann Biomed Eng 48, 2078–2089 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-019-02429-4
• Ansari A, Patel R, Schultheis K, Naumovski V, Imoukhuede PI. A Method of Targeted Cell Isolation via Glass Surface Functionalization. J Vis Exp. 2016 Sep 20;(115):54315. doi: 10.3791/54315. PMID: 27684992; PMCID: PMC5092063.
• Ansari, A., Imoukhuede, P.I. Plenty more room on the glass bottom: Surface functionalization and nanobiotechnology for cell isolation. Nano Res. 11, 5107–5129 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-2177-7
• Chen, Si et al. Current State-of-The-Art and Future Directions in Systems Biology. Progress and Communication in Sciences, [S.l.], v. 1, n. 1, p. 12-26, oct. 2014. ISSN 2288-7113.
• Ansari, A., Lee-Montiel, F.T., Amos, J.R. and Imoukhuede, P.I. (2015), Secondary anchor targeted cell release. Biotechnol. Bioeng., 112: 2214-2227. https://doi.org/10.1002/bit.25648
• Ansari, A., Trehan, R., Watson, C., & Senyo, S. (2021). Increasing silicone mold longevity: a review of surface modification techniques for PDMS-PDMS double casting. Soft Materials, 19(4), 388–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/1539445X.2020.1850476
• X. Wang, A. Ansari, V. Pierre, K. Young, C. R. Kothapalli, H. A. von Recum, S. E. Senyo, Injectable Extracellular Matrix Microparticles Promote Heart Regeneration in Mice with Post-ischemic Heart Injury. Adv. Healthcare Mater. 2022, 11, 2102265. https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.202102265

Articles in Conference Proceedings

• Bethke, Eliot; Ansari, Ali, Amos, Jennifer R.; Bradley Joe; Ochia, Ruth P.E.; Golecki, Holly M., “An Adaptive Scaffolding Approach Based on Team Dynamics in an Integrated Masters and Undergraduate Bioengineering Capstone Design Course”, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. 2024 Accepted
• Bethke, Eliot; Ansari, Ali, Amos, Jennifer R.; Bradley Joe; Ochia, Ruth P.E.; Golecki, Holly M., “Bridging extracurricular skill needs in bioengineering capstone design with just-in-time workshops.”, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. 2024 Accepted
• Submitted but pulled WIP Paper for ASEE Annual Conference 2025- Received a workshop presentation on Sunday, June 22nd, Ansari, Ali, “Workshop: Sunday Workshop: Making Serious Games Less Serious: Building Inclusive Game and Puzzle-based Learning Modules”. 2025
• Submitted Abstract for BMES Annual Conference 2024- Ansari, Ali, “Fantastic Games And How To Find Them: Developing Game- Based Learning Modules for Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering Curriculum”, Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting, Portland, OR October 2024 Submitted
• Submitted WIP Paper for ASEE Annual Conference 2024- Received a poster presentation Ansari, Ali, “Work in Progress: Enhancing Student Engagement and Interest in STEM Education through Game-Based Learning Techniques in Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering Core Curricula and How to Create Them”, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. 2024 Accepted

Abstracts (in print or accepted)

• Ansari A. Work in Progress: Enhancing Student Engagement and Interest in STEM Education through Game-Based Learning Techniques in Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering Core Curricula and How to Create Them. ASEE Annual Conference 2024. 2024 June; Urbana, Illinois, United States.
• Ansari A. Workshop: Sunday Workshop: Making Serious Games Less Serious: Building Inclusive Game and Puzzle-based Learning Modules. ASEE Annual Conference 2025. 2025 June; Urbana, Illinois, United States
• Mann J, Wright A, Althaus E, Chang W, Ansari A, Cvetkovic C, Hajj R, Golecki H. Reflective Teaching Practices for Equity-Minded Engineering Instructors. ; ASEE Conferences.
• Ansari A. Board 12: Work in Progress: Enhancing Student Engagement and Interest in STEM Education through Game-Based Learning Techniques in Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering Core Curricula and How to Create Them. ; ASEE Conferences.
• Mann J, Golecki H, Chang W, Hajj R, Ansari A, Cvetkovic C. (2025). Y(Our) story: A collaborative autoethnographic reflection of a faculty community of practice to promote equity-oriented engineering education. American Society for Engineering Education(ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition, Montreal Canada, June 2025.

Patents

• 18/716,576

Professional Societies

• ASEE General Member (2021-Present)
• BMES General Member (2013-Present)
• BEEC General Member (2021-Present)

Teaching Honors

• 2024 Excellent Teacher Rating based on ICES ratings from the Department Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning
• 2023 Excellent Teacher Rating based on ICES ratings from the Department Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

Improvement Activities

• Learning Community: NSF DEEP Reflective Teaching Community of Practice (2024-present)
• Integrating the Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) in Lab and Design Experiences workshop, hosted by AE3, University of Illinois (June 2024)
• Biomedical Engineering Education Community (2021-present)
• Collins Scholars Program for New Faculty, Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3), University of Illinois (2023-present)

Recent Courses Taught

• BIOE 100 - Undergraduate Open Seminar
• BIOE 120 - Introduction to Bioengineering
• BIOE 205 - Signals & Systems in Bioengrg
• BIOE 400 - Bioengineering Senior Design
• BIOE 414 (ECE 414) - Biomedical Instrumentation