A self-professed nerd, Debbie Chachra fostered her love of engineering science and physics by studying at the University of Toronto. During her junior year, she co-founded a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) summer camp for kids in grades 5–8 to introduce them at an early age to the subjects she herself loved. The project was so successful that the university has continued to run it since, eventually folding it into their roster of other summer outreach programs for pre-college youth.

After earning her Bachelor of Applied Science in engineering, Chachra began graduate studies in materials science, also at the University of Toronto, when she quickly discovered that she wanted to teach.

“I did an unusual amount of teaching for a graduate student,” recalls Chachra. “I had a very supportive graduate adviser who encouraged me to go beyond the lab, so I took a certificate program on teaching in higher education. And I got involved in academic governance, including being the graduate student representative on the search committee for a new dean of the faculty of applied science and engineering.”

During her education, Chachra also followed her love of research, eventually choosing her own topic for her senior year thesis in engineering—a project that has her just one degree of separation away from a Nobel Prize.

“I had already done a summer of research in experimental nuclear astrophysics, and there was a big question at the time: the solar neutrino problem, or why the sun didn’t seem to be producing as many of these subatomic particles, neutrinos, as it should,” says Chachra. “I found the issue fascinating. Scientists had realized that one way to answer the question could involve a really deep hole and lots of heavy water.”

Canada has both in abundance: the heavy water—water in which the hydrogen is replaced with deuterium, a chemically similar but heavier isotope—because of its nuclear power program, and the deep holes because of mining.

Chachra reached out to Arthur B. McDonald, a professor at Queen’s University in nearby Kingston, who was leading the nascent project, and offered to help in any way she could. Her feasibility study of an approach to neutrino detection earned her an “A” on her thesis; McDonald’s work, spearheading the construction and operation of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory at the bottom of a nickel mine in northern Ontario, was instrumental in solving the solar neutrino problem and earned him a Nobel Prize in physics in 2015.

“We know that the learning outcomes associated with working on what you care about are better than ones associated with things you have to do—like taking an exam—and my own personal experience reflects that,” says Chachra. “Fostering this kind of intrinsic motivation dovetails perfectly with the project-based learning we do here at Olin: We provide scaffolding for learning experiences that allow students to have purpose and autonomy in what and how they learn, which helps to enable those deep educational outcomes.”

After graduating with her Ph.D., Chachra received a national fellowship and became a postdoctoral associate at MIT in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She joined the Olin faculty in 2003, where much of her work has been dedicated to creating positive change in engineering education.

“At Olin, the professors genuinely care about the full range of their work—from connecting one-on-one with their students, through conducting research, through its implications for other institutions and for policy in higher education,” says Chachra. “One of the joys of being at Olin as an educator is to make these links between the direct experiences of young, developing technologists and that bigger picture.”

In her current line of research, Chachra received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to fund her forthcoming book, which examines the complex relationship between infrastructural systems and society, including issues around equity and climate change. The book, provisionally titled Public Utility, is slated for publication in 2023 by Riverhead Books.

Originally from Marblehead, MA, David Shuman was ready for a change of scenery when the time came for college. He attended Stanford, where he wasn’t quite sure what to choose for his major.

“I thought maybe math or some type of engineering, but the large lecture formats of the introductory courses were not engaging,” says Shuman.

Shuman ended up choosing economics with a minor in computer science. He completed all the necessary courses by his third year at Stanford, so he opted for a coterminal program in his final year that allowed him to earn his master’s degree in an interdisciplinary field: Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research.

“The program was at the intersection of applied math, engineering, and entrepreneurship,” says Shuman. “I also took a course in mechatronics and, with an interdisciplinary team, built a basketball-playing robot; at first I felt like I was in over my head, but I really enjoyed it, and that project-based learning experience reopened my eyes to the world of engineering.”

After graduating, Shuman began doing strategy consulting for the mergers and acquisitions subsidiary of Monitor Group, a Cambridge-based consulting firm. He worked in New York, London, San Francisco, and more, on everything from biotech to cement.

After three years, Shuman went back to school at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor for his PhD in electrical engineering: systems. He researched algorithms to help wireless communications towers efficiently stream video data to cell users.

Shuman met his now-wife, Vera, at U-M, where she was completing her PhD in social psychology. They both went to Switzerland for their postdocs: her in Geneva and him at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Here, he changed research areas again, this time to signal processing on graphs, a relatively new field that brings together ideas from mathematics, electrical engineering, statistics, data science, machine learning, computer vision, and statistical physics.

After he completed his postdoc, Shuman joined the faculty at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN in January 2014.

“I’m always looking into new areas and working with new people, which allows me to identify interesting intersections between fields that inform my research and my teaching,” says Shuman. “Macalester was great because I was a member of a joint mathematics, statistics, and computer science department. I was lucky to be able to design new data science courses with colleagues from all three of these disciplines.”

The intentional cross-curricular design and the focus on service to society also made Olin an attractive choice for Shuman’s next step.

“At Olin, I’m looking forward to co-developing and -teaching classes with my colleagues,” says Shuman.

“I’m also interested in using data science for social justice and thinking more about equity in access to higher education. Olin’s mission of ‘engineering for everyone’ resonates with me.”

This year, Shuman will teach the first two semesters of Olin’s three-semester quantitative engineering analysis sequence, as well as a course in probabilistic modeling. He looks forward to involving Olin students in his research in the area of signal processing on graphs, developing tools, theory, and algorithms for finding patterns or structure in high-dimensional data in domains such as transportation networks, ranked choice voting, medical imaging, and genetics.

Shuman and his wife have two sons, Jacob (8) and Noah (5). Once upon a time (read: before kids), he was an avid hiker, traveler, and photographer of nature and landscapes; he also enjoys playing soccer and squash.

Helen Donis-Keller has crafted a diverse career that has spanned the arts and the sciences and back again.

After high school, she began earning her degree in graphic design and photography from the University of Cincinnati before a move to Canada cut her time in the program short. She began working as a graphic designer at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, instead.

“While I was there, I started grazing through different classes that the university offered,” says Donis-Keller. “I tried many subjects—anthropology, psychology, geography—before I discovered chemistry, which was like opening up a whole new world.”

Donis-Keller became interested in synthetic organic chemistry, which is a branch devoted to creating organic compounds. She also explored her innate love of the outdoors by studying biology. Eventually, she earned two bachelor’s degrees from Lakehead: one in natural sciences and one in honors biology.

As an undergraduate, Donis-Keller began doing research for various professors. She loved the scholarly pursuits, but she knew that to create her own projects, she would need a PhD. She went to Harvard and studied biochemistry and molecular biology under Walter Gilbert, who would eventually go on to receive the Nobel Prize for his work on developing a DNA sequencing method.

While at Harvard, Donis-Keller developed a method for RNA sequencing before starting her post-doc in virology at Harvard Medical School. Soon after, she received a call from her former mentor.

“Wally [Gilbert] was now a scientific advisor for Biogen, which was just getting started,” says Donis-Keller. “I loved the idea of working for a start-up, so I became their third employee as the assistant research director of molecular biology in the Cambridge branch of the company.”

After working at Biogen for a few years, Donis-Keller moved to Collaborative Research, Inc. to have more strategic control over her projects. Here, she began to map the human genome.

“My team and I spent five years on a genetic linkage map, and we eventually developed predictive tests for genetic diseases based on what we discovered,” says Donis-Keller. “We were the first group to identify the location of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis and ended up on front page of The New York Times for our human genome map.”

After almost a decade at Collaborative Research, funding for her genetic mapping project ran out, and Donis-Keller was offered a role at Washington University in St. Louis to continue her research.

“Working in higher education gave me the independence and intellectual freedom I’d been looking for,” says Donis-Keller.

Here, she continued identifying the genetic locations of other inherited disorders, such as multiple endocrine neoplasia; the diagnostic tests she developed became the standard of care to assess a particular kind of thyroid cancer.

But despite her scientific successes, Donis-Keller never stopped being interested in art and photography, working on this passion in her spare time, even as she traveled the world to speak at conferences.

“I had a sabbatical coming up, but I couldn’t leave campus because of the big lab I was running at the time, so I decided to stay and take drawing and print-making courses through the art department,” says Donis-Keller. “I realized I found so much joy in art that I couldn’t give it up ever again.”

Donis-Keller decided to make a change, so she got jobs for all her employees, then closed her lab and started an MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She learned to work with different mediums and began experimenting with integrating art and science together, such as Genotype : Phenotype, which is a work of self-portraiture as a visual metaphor for the relationship between nature and nurture.

“I was finishing up my degree and beginning to wonder who would hire me now; I knew a standard university wouldn’t do a joint appointment in art and science,” says Donis-Keller. “That’s when I heard about Olin. They were looking for a biology professor, and they ended up creating this joint position for me so I could do both.”

One of the first professors at Olin, Donis-Keller teaches everything from digital photography to advanced biogenetics. Her latest course, “The Intersection of Biology, Art, and Technology (IBAT),” is a fluid, project-based class in which students explores the deep connections between these three disciplines together in an interesting, self-determined way—indicative of Olin’s student-centered focus.

Learn more about Donis-Keller’s work on her website.

After completing his PhD at the University of Michigan, Chris Lee began working for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He brought his mechanical engineering background to projects ranging from artificial retinas to earthquake-resistant structures to DNA modeling.

After 12 years of this interdisciplinary and rewarding work, Lee came across an advertisement in the back of an engineering magazine for a faculty position at a new college called Olin.

“I wasn’t actually looking to change my job at the time, but I had always been interested in a faculty position,” says Lee.  “I applied on a whim but when I came to campus for the interview, I discovered that Olin was an amazing place with such enormous opportunities that I couldn’t pass it up.”

At Livermore, Lee says that the greatest challenge, but also the greatest enjoyment, came from applying, and often adapting, traditional engineering methods to new applications. There were always interesting projects to tackle and the resources to support the work.  He brings that same environment to Olin.

“I have multiple research projects available at any one time that both students and I will be interested in,” says Lee. “The activity I enjoy the most is conducting research with students. We get the chance to use engineering that we know and have learned in a variety of creative ways.”

When Lee first arrived at Olin in 2006, his initial projects centered on vibration energy harvesting devices. He soon moved to using 3D printing for biomedical devices, which was a brand-new area at the time. Working with radiologists at Boston Medical Center, he and students designed, fabricated, and tested, an imaging phantom based on a patient’s own anatomy for radiation therapy of prostate cancer, as well as a patient-specific, 3D printed fixture for MR-guided core needle biopsies of the breast that enables removal of samples from the smallest of lesions.

Recently, Lee and his students worked with the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office to understand the minimum size of debris in Earth’s orbit that can be tracked.

“Even a tiny piece of debris the size of a marble can do catastrophic damage when traveling at high speeds,” says Lee, who also studied aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. “NASA wants to know if ground-based radar can detect debris in low-Earth orbit, so we designed a set of experiments that would be deployed by ThinSats, new class of small satellites which are about the size of a slice of bread.”

This interdisciplinary project has drawn Olin students from various backgrounds—electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computing and more.

“Students are one of the best things about Olin,” says Lee. “They’re uniformly enthusiastic, creative, and hard-working. Then you work with them closely and you see that they are very much individuals with their own stories to tell.”

Growing up in Kanpur, India, Chhavi Goenka was inspired to become an engineer by Kalpana Chawla, an astronaut, mechanical engineer, and the first Indian woman to go to space. Goenka was also fascinated by small electronic devices—she frequently took them apart as a child, much to the chagrin of her family.

“When I decided to major in electrical engineering, my father joked that maybe now I’d learn how to put them all back together again,” laughs Goenka, who attended the Cummins College of Engineering, a women’s college at Pune University in India.

While in school, Goenka became interested in large-scale chip design; she planned to study further in the U.S. and then work for a big tech company like Intel. She started her master’s degree in computer systems at Boston University, but, instead of chip design, her advisor was conducting research in space physics. Goenka saw the opportunity to go back to her original plan to work in aerospace.

“Josh Semeter was working on a satellite to take more complete pictures of the Northern Lights from space,” says Goenka. “It’s important to also look at them from the bottom, so I during my PhD I designed a new ground-based imaging system, doing fieldwork in Fairbanks, Alaska.”

During this project, Goenka worked with Scientific Solutions, Inc. in North Chelmsford to design new filters for the imaging system, which led to a job offer as a staff scientist after graduation. In her role, Goenka used her expertise in imaging to create a portable spectrometer for skin cancer screening.

“Switching from space instruments that were about the size of a human to a small, handheld healthcare device was an enjoyable challenge,” says Goenka.

“I really like to pursue projects that are 1) the most fun and 2) the most useful, and biomedicine seemed like a more human-centered use of my experience.”

Goenka decided to follow this new path as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital through Harvard Medical School.

“I didn’t know how much is accomplished in medicine by using light,” says Goenka. “I started designing more instruments for human medicine, such as imaging technologies for low-resource settings and an optical and machine learning framework for studies of mitochondria specific to sepsis management.”

A constant throughout Goenka’s interdisciplinary career has been student mentorship. She has worked with undergraduate researchers on summer research and Capstone projects from a smartphone fluorescence microscope for ultraviolet applications to a more equitable pulse oximeter that works on darker skin tones.

“I really love working with students, and I’m devoted to social justice,” says Goenka, who co-founded the Wellman Anti-Racism Effort and Wellman Outreach Committee at MGH. These groups seek to educate themselves and others about inequity in STEM and cultivate better mentorship for students and post-docs.

In her first faculty role, Goenka joins Olin as an assistant professor of engineering, where she will begin by co-teaching “Design Nature,” as well as “Technology, Accessibility, and Design” this fall. She will also be starting a lab to research biomedical optics, and she looks forward to working closely with students to determine what applications they are interested in pursuing.

Before COVID, Goenka enjoyed playing the dhol and tabla in her band, Awaaz Do; she remains an avid musician, playing violin, keyboard, and more. Goenka is also an enthusiastic cook and is ready to make you the world’s best omelet at the drop of a hat.

Growing up in Nigeria, Kenechukwu Mbanisi engaged in typical STEM activities as a child: tinkering, taking things apart, and exploring how they work. At school, he enjoyed both math and biology and decided to either become an engineer or a surgeon.

“I quickly discovered that I don’t do too well with blood, so my destiny was sealed,” Mbanisi laughs.

While completing his undergraduate degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Covenant University in Ogun State, Nigeria, Mbanisi interned abroad in automation, which led to his exposure in robotics.

“My first stint with robotics was as an undergrad in 2012 during an internship with a manufacturing company,” says Mbanisi. “My final project was building an industrial robot arm, doing everything from software to fabrication. It was challenging and frustrating and enjoyable, and I knew it was something I wanted to do more long-term.”

In 2016, he continued this path by attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) for his master’s and PhD in robotics. One of his first research projects, funded by Toyota, was building a simulation framework to study how human drivers interact with intelligent vehicles.

“We were simulating scenarios of how semi- and fully autonomous vehicles can interact with humans,” says Mbanisi. “The product we developed was published in journals and set the direction for my PhD research to go beyond simulation.”

Mbanisi began designing intelligent semi-autonomous systems that reduce the cognitive or physical burdens of the humans who control them. His research runs the gamut from search and rescue robots to aerial vehicles to technology that allows a person to control their wheelchair more easily.

Now joining Olin as an assistant professor of robotics engineering, Mbanisi looks forward to becoming a part of another dynamic community focused on an equitable engineering education.

“Looking back, it was probably written in the stars that I would cross paths with Olin someday,” says Mbanisi. “I first learned about the college in 2017 when I was researching engineering education in general, and I was blown away by their mission. I found a strong resonance with Olin’s goals and the impact-centered curriculum, and I feel lucky that they were hiring when I completed my PhD.”

Mbanisi will teach an interdisciplinary, team-taught principles of engineering course about building intelligent systems, as well as a course on controls that helps students learn to use mathematical tools to understand and regulate dynamic systems, which is useful in many industries from healthcare to manufacturing.

In the future, he hopes to develop more courses about human-robot interaction to help students prepare for the “inevitable future in which we’ll butt heads with robots in multiple ways every day,” says Mbanisi.

In addition to his courses, Mbanisi looks forward to continuing his community outreach work that uses engineering as a platform for equity and diversity, helping to expand access to robotics and AI to people from underrepresented backgrounds, both in the U.S. and Africa.

Mbanisi and his wife, Tumininu—who is currently completing her PhD in electrical engineering from UNC Charlotte—live in Worcester with their new baby boy. They both enjoy their church community and singing in the choir (though Mbanisi says his wife is better at it than he is) and connecting with their families back in Nigeria as often as possible.