Alumni Profiles Series: Joseph Tranquillo

Joseph Tranquillo received his B.S. from Trinity College, his Ph.D. from Duke in biomedical engineering working on cardiovascular modelling, and was a visiting scholar at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah and Stanford Technology Ventures Program. He went on to be the first direct hire at Bucknell University’s new biomedical engineering department and helped grow the program. From there, Dr. Tranquillo became the Associate Provost for Transformative Teaching and Learning in addition to his role as a professor of biomedical engineering. Dr. Tranquillo previously served as director of the Teaching and Learning Center, co-director of the Institute for Leadership in Technology and Management, and co-founder of the Bucknell Innovation Group and KEEN Winter Interdisciplinary Design Experience.

What were your professional or career plans after completing your graduate degree?

Like most graduate students, I was conflicted between pursuing a career in academia or industry. After wrapping up my Ph.D., I decided to take up a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Bursac at Duke. After graduating, a lot of Ph.D. students from the Henriquez group, the group I had done my Ph.D. with, had transitioned to industry. When the opportunity presented itself, however, I took up the offer to become a first direct hire at the newly minted Biomedical Engineering Department at Bucknell University. I have always been entrepreneurial and do not shy away from taking the less trodden path—in this case, it was pursuing academia instead of going into industry.  While accepting an offer from a research-focused educational institute would have perhaps been easier or more of a seamless transition, I decided to take on a role that emphasized teaching as much as it did research.

How do you use your engineering background in your administrative roles?

My work in engineering actually equipped me quite well for the responsibilities that come with being a director or associate provost. For example, I was able to use a first-principle approach from engineering to improve retention rates for undergraduate admissions. The way you use this in a design perspective is analyzing the worst types of failures that could occur (otherwise known as catastrophic failures) and then asking oneself if and how one can redesign a particular system to prevent or minimize these failures.  That’s the engineer in me, and that’s what I did for the student experience. I systematically asked and addressed particular questions: “What are all the failures in the student experience? Where are all the places that Bucknell is failing when it comes to student experience? Is it happening all of a sudden? Does it happen to a lot of students?”

There are other things that I steal from engineering, or systems way of thinking, all the time. For example, when you are dealing with a system, a big university, one of the ways that things can go wrong is only communicating important information through one channel. Students listen to different channels than staff, faculty, parents, and trustees do. So, a smarter way to distribute information is to send it out via multiple communication channels—that’s just information theory. All I’m doing is using what I know about how information flows, how you build redundancy into systems, without necessarily needing to even use engineering words to explain these ideas to others.

On the surface, someone who isn’t an engineer would look at that and go, “Oh, Joe has this process for thinking about [things],” but an engineer would go, “You took an engineering failure analysis and applied it to your work…” I use it all the time, but if you don’t know what to look for, it doesn’t look like I am an engineer.

Tell me about your role as Associate Provost of Transformative Teaching and Learning.

In terms of transforming teaching, I have undertaken projects in the engineering domain on pushing the boundaries of problem-based learning that have got me recognition outside of Bucknell. In problem-based learning, instead of starting explicitly with first principles, one starts with a problem. I give my students a problem and ask them how they would approach or solve it. Presenting students with this kind of messy, real-world, challenging problem gets them interested and invested.

At some point in that process, they begin hitting at some of the fundamental principles of physics and engineering. That’s when you formally teach them that material. So, it’s flipping what we normally do in engineering, where you teach the principles first and then have students complete homework problems to implement those principles.

Here's an example of how I have made that far more extreme. I brought a group of 33 students to Chile for three and a half weeks. It was with a group of other faculty, but I was the lead person bringing them. For the first week, we travelled around Chile to a number of different places. Each student had one of the UN sustainable development goals. Their job was to create and present a photo essay of the problems they saw intersecting with that goal. They then got into teams and had to decide if they could prototype a solution to one of the identified problems.

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Then, we spent five days in a ruka (a traditional Mapuche house in Chile), where the living spaces constitute the outer part of the structure and surround a big, open, inner space. We all lived together, with no cell phones and no internet, 50 km away from the nearest town. We really were in the middle of nowhere and students could only use local materials. They got to write up one shopping list of parts they needed, which another faculty member and I picked up after driving 50 km to the nearest town. But they were only allowed to do that once. Students created a whole variety of prototypes and had to pitch it out. So, those were five days of an intense design challenge in another country where students had to go out and look for a problem and connect it to the question of how their proposed solution would make a measurable impact on the sustainable development goal for Chile. 

The students on that trip still talk about that experience. And in subsequent surveys, a number of them have commented that other design challenges seem easy in comparison to that one. I publish and present reflections like that to other faculty and institutions to demonstrate the possibilities for engaging students in engineering and systems design. So, I think I have, in terms of the transformational part, tried to help engineering faculties and engineering schools think about the kinds of engineers that we actually want to produce.

How have you incorporated transformative learning in your classes?

I think engineers used to be tinkerers. We just used to build stuff—this is like 100 years ago or so—but as the sciences rose, we got science-envy, i.e., engineers tried to become more like scientists—be more scientific in their approach, which is fine. But, in the 1940s to 1960s, there was a shift where the curriculum mandated students to take four calculus classes, four physics classes, and two chemistry classes. And then, at some point, after learning about all of that, you were allowed to be an engineer and actually design and build something. So, part of the transformation I have been trying to work on is flipping that process around a little bit.

For another example, I have been a musician for a long time but left it behind. When I got to Bucknell, I joined an improv group as a side hobby. I had taught a signals and systems class about seven or eight times. Students had to complete a project by the end of the course and they were learning signals and systems just through the process of doing that. At some point, I got bored, because the guidelines—for example, inventing a new medical device using signals and systems—led to students creating fairly similar devices over time. I wanted to put myself back in the position where I didn’t actually know the answers, so that when a student came to me and asked, “How are we gonna do this?” I could legitimately say, “I don’t know. Let’s go figure it together.”

 So, I partnered with a music professor and had his improv musicians and my engineers co-meet once a week apart from their regular course meetings with the goal of creating five brand-new musical instruments that used some sort of biological signal. The instruments had to be something that could actually be played in a coherent fashion and alongside traditional instruments, like those in an orchestra. This was before Arduinos and other open-source hardware, so it was actually a lot harder than it sounds (it would be much easier to do it now). My students had to learn a fair bit of music theory, and the musicians ended up needing to learn a bunch of things about signals and systems so that they could even talk to each other and work together.

There were two really interesting fun parts. The first was a student who came up to me and essentially said, “Now that I have spent all this time with the musicians, I have learned that they are not just making things up: they are using music theory and have been trained so well in music theory and in playing their instruments that they can now improvise. They are not thinking about techniques or theory but are focusing on improvisation. That’s the kind of engineer I want to be. I want to be the engineer that has compiled the techniques of engineering so deeply that I can become an intuitive engineer.” I will never forget this, because all I could think was, “Yes, that is the point!” Engineering is not just formulaic; it can include improvisation as well.

The other interesting part was the students’ decision to open up their final performance to all of campus, even though they could have chosen a smaller audience. The performance was scheduled for the same date as the trustee weekend, so the musicians performed in the basement of the student center for all of the trustees.

And here was the catch: about a week before, a couple of the engineers had come to me and said, “You know, because we are the ones who built the instruments, we’re the ones who have been debugging and playing with them, we actually know how to play these instruments better than the musicians. Is it okay if we actually play the instruments that we made?” That was exactly what we had hoped for. So, the engineers actually played the instruments, and the musicians improvised on their traditional instruments, which resulted in a special concert for our trustees. The engineering students involved in that project left the class feeling like they were ready to handle real-world design projects.

Do you have any advice for current graduate students?

I would say, and it’s related to the entrepreneurial way of thinking, is to look for opportunities. They may not be opportunities directly in your lab, or directly pertaining to your particular area. There is a time in grad school where you have to put your head down and just do the assigned work. But I think it’s important to develop the skill of what I call task-switching. You put your head down for a period of time, but then you can pick your head up and look around and see what kinds of opportunities are available, see what kinds of things are happening, talk to people in other labs, learn about other fields. You might learn something from a cell biologist that all of a sudden becomes the really cool new thing that you are able to add to your project.

The high-minded, almost philosophical piece of this is that it’s what getting a Ph.D. is all about. It’s called the Doctor of Philosophy for a reason. It’s not what your project is: it’s helping you hone a way of thinking, and I think you can get that by following a project really deeply. A Ph.D. allows you to develop the skill of engaging deeply in your project, while also having moments of entrepreneurial thinking or opportunity recognition. It’s a skill you can develop in grad school, and it’s a skill that will help you no matter what path you follow afterwards, which could be going and starting a lab, becoming a professor, starting a department, going into industry or consulting—there’s a lot of paths that one could take. But that task-switching ability is at the core of the philosophy of getting the degree, getting a Ph.D.

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AUTHOR

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Anshuman Sabath

Ph.D. student, Biomedical Engineering

Anshuman Sabath is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke, where he studies computational neuroscience in the Dunn lab. Besides research, Anshuman is also passionate about research translation and commercialization. He likes to spend his free time reading non-fiction.