Students aren’t the only ones getting acclimated to campus and classes as the fall semester gets underway. It’s also a new beginning for faculty. IUPUI Today talked with three new faculty members to learn about their experiences, their research and what they hope to achieve in their new roles.
Rehab Morsi
Lecturer and lead instructor, Program of Intensive English, School of Liberal Arts
Rehab Morsi has 12 years of experience teaching English as a second language and English for specific purposes to international students, including classes at the Intensive English Institute at Ball State University and the International Center for Intercultural Communication at IUPUI. She has a master’s in teaching English to speakers of other languages and is pursuing a doctorate in literacy, language and culture in education at Indiana University Bloomington.
Question: What appealed to you about teaching at IUPUI?
Answer: I have always appreciated how the campus emphasizes and embraces its unique cultural diversity. I am very thankful and excited to work alongside faculty and students of different backgrounds and worldviews.
Q: How do you hope to impact students?
A: I believe that establishing a good rapport with my ESL students opens doors for success. I value a meaningful student-teacher relationship. I believe that students learn best when they are heard and when they feel respected, so I work to create a safe space where they can comfortably express themselves and make errors in the target language without losing their self-esteem.
I also believe that advancing in the target language won’t occur unless ESL students feel that their native languages and native cultures are valued and cherished. I want my students to make sense of the target language and the target culture while sharing the ample knowledge they have in their cultures.
Q: What do you like to do when you’re not working?
A: I enjoy reading, cooking and spending time with my family.
JuexinWang
Assistant professor, bioinformatics, School of Informatics and Computing
Juexin Wang has a bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. in computer science. He begins his career as a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. This semester, he will teach Application Programming for Biomedical Data Analysis/Programming for Science Informatics, an introductory course for students who would like to use Linux, Python, R and web developmentin scientific analysis and research.
Q:What appealed to you about teaching at IUPUI?
A: IUPUI provides many bioinformatics-related programs such as computer science, informatics, health and biology. There are many talented students eager to learn and practice.
Q: What is something from your research, studies or teaching that you found particularly interesting?
A: I found both molecular biology and machine learning quite fascinating. In the last decade, the advancement of molecular biology provides unparalleled precision and resolution measurements to biological systems, like single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics. There are a lot of challenges and opportunities to explore these sequencing data.
In the meantime, the emergence of machine learning provides unprecedented power to solve complex mathematical problems. How to develop the machine learning tools to discover the mechanisms behind this data and promote human health is quite interesting to me.
Q:How do you hope to impact students?
A: I hope my passion for excellence and scientific rigor helps students open the door to success in informatics. Coding is a skill, and there are limitless possibilities with coding.
It needs rigor, but there is also an art to programming. I hope I can impact students during the hands-on practice of programming.
Mustafa Abdallah
Assistant professor, School of Engineering and Technology
Mustafa Abdallah has a Ph.D. from the Purdue University Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include game theory, behavioral decision-making and deep learning, with applications including cyber security and data science. He is a Purdue Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship recipient and has extensive industrial research experience, including internships with Adobe Research, Principal and RDI.
Q: What is something from your research, studies or teaching that you found particularly interesting?
A: My current research to predict the effects of human decision-making bias in securing interdependent systems, and to design practical learning algorithms to mitigate such effects, is very interesting to me because I’m exploring real problems and trying to understand our bias as humans.
Q: How do you hope to impact students?
A: I hope to help students achieve academic excellence and learn new concepts. I’m very excited about the wireless communications course since it has applications in everything around us.
Q: What do you like best about Indianapolis so far?
A: Indianapolis has everything nearby, especially Mediterranean restaurants, nice parks and places to take my children.
