Engineering Literati: Inaugural Dean’s Book Club brings together eclectic mix of engineers

UAB School of Engineering Dean Jeff Holmes wasn't sure what kind of response he would get when he invited current engineering students to join a book club during the spring semester of 2021.

holmes After all, college-level engineering courses require an intense focus on math and science and hours in the lab, where fundamentals learned in the classroom are put into practice. Because of that time commitment and other concerns, would students to join him in what some might see as a decidedly non-engineering-type of activity?

The response was a resounding yes; more than 40 students signed up for the club, which met online via Zoom on Thursday evenings throughout the semester to discuss Katherine Standefer’s 2020 book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life.

Now that the first Dean’s Book Club is in the books, we asked Dean Holmes to reflect on this novel extra-curricular engineering experience.

standefer Considering everything that has been going on in the past year, what inspired you to create a book club for engineering students?

I read Standefer’s book over the winter holiday, and I found myself asking questions that I had never considered before. The book is a memoir of a patient who as a young adult has a defibrillator implanted in her chest due to a genetic heart condition. As a biomedical engineer with a background in cardiac research, I thought I was pretty familiar with these devices, but the author asked questions I had never stopped to consider, eventually visiting not only manufacturing facilities but also mines around the world and addressing issues ranging from sustainability to health care costs and insurance. The more I read, the more I thought it would make an interesting book to read with students who are studying to go into not only biomedical engineering but also materials engineering, mining, medicine, and other fields.

How did you pitch this to the students? I imagine many of them were already signed up for classes that required them to buy a lot of books and do a lot of reading.

I definitely didn’t want this to be a burden on anyone, either financially or in the time investment. The book is less than 250 pages with some fairly short chapters, so I thought meeting once per week would give students freedom to read a little bit at a time. But we also kept it very informal so if someone fell behind, they could still sit in on the meeting and benefit from the discussions.

I wasn’t sure what kind of response I would get, so I purchased 20 copies of the book and offered them for free to the first 20 who responded. I initially planned to cap it at those first 20, but the response was so big, with more than 40 people signing up, I decided to leave it open to as many who wanted to participate. Of course, some came and went as the semester went along, but we had a core group of a dozen or more students who kept things going, and the others joined in as they could.

How did it go? Was their reaction to the book similar to yours?

Not only were their reactions different from mine, there was a wide range of reactions within the group. Even though we are all engineers at some level, the students who participated came from such diverse backgrounds and life experiences that they each brought their unique perspective to the book. Some of them had worked in mining or energy industries in the past, while others had experience as healthcare workers, patients, or family members of people with genetic and chronic dieases.

As I told them in our final meeting, the thing I will remember most is those discussions where we veered away from what we had read in the book and discussed life experiences. When I think about this book in the future, I’ll remember most those pieces of our discussion that may have only marginally related to the book itself.

COVID restrictions meant that the book club was all-virtual. Do you think this is an activity (and format) you might continue post-pandemic?

Absolutely. As long as our students are still interested in participating, I will keep doing this. The first step is to pick a book to discuss, so if anyone has suggestions, please send them along. We may also look at different timelines so that students don’t have to do all of the reading while classes are in session. Next year we might identify a book prior to the winter break so that people can read ahead.

In terms of format, I would love to be able to hold these meetings in person in the future, but I recognize that the online meetings opened this up to a lot of students who couldn’t have made it in person. Some were joining from their research labs while others were graduate students living out of state. While we now know that nobody wants to spend all day on Zoom, the pandemic has opened up new ways for us to meet and collaborate from a distance. So I think Zoom book club might just have a future.

More News

Mansur awarded a TL1 fellowship to study health disparity in HER2-positive breast cancer patients

by Hannah Buckelew
Ameer Mansur, a Ph.D. candidate in the laboratory of Anna Sorace, Ph.D., assistant professor in the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been awarded a pre-doctoral research training program (TL1) fellowship from the UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCTS), for his project, titled, “Prognostic biometric extraction of multiparametric imaging data in human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER2) positive breast cancer.” The fellowship is effective July 1, 2023 and will run through July 2024.

Feldman retires after nearly four decades at UAB

After a career spanning nearly 40 years at UAB in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Dale Feldman, Ph.D., associate professor, officially retired on May 31, 2023. This is not, however, the conclusion of his long and productive career. Feldman emphasizes that he will continue to assist the department with accreditation for undergraduate education, and to teach two of the three required courses for the Translation of Biomedical Innovations to Clinical Practice certificate program.

UAB Goldwater Scholars announced for 2023

The scholarship recognizes outstanding natural sciences, engineering and mathematics students by awarding up to $7,500 for academic expenses.

Stevenson awarded NIH internship to study acoustophoresis in cell washing

by Hannah Buckelew
Biomedical Engineering student Emma Stevenson has been awarded a 10-week Biomedical Engineering Summer Internship from the National Institute of Health’s Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NBIB) for her project titled, “Automation of radioactive cell labeling using microfluidic acoustophoresis.” The NBIB summer internship allows rising biomedical engineering students to participate in cutting-edge research projects under the mentorship of world-class scientists in NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland, from June 5 to August 11, 2023.

Co-op program creates a pipeline into a growing industry

BioHorizons is a Birmingham company whose history is rooted in UAB. Today, thanks to a growing and successful co-op program, it appears that BioHorizons and UAB will continue to be linked far into the future.

The dental-implant company, which started as a spinoff of research from the UAB Schools of Engineering and Dentistry, has hired more than a dozen UAB alumni and students over the past 28 years. More recently, though, its co-op program has begun to bring in current engineering undergraduates—creating a talent pipeline for students to get a head start in a growing industry.

“Hands-on experience has always been a key element of engineering education,” said Neil Adams, director of the Engineering Career Center. “The success of our program depends on strong co-op and intern partners, like BioHorizons, who offer quality experiences to our students so that they apply their engineering knowledge while also learning how to be a contributing part of a professional organization. We are proud of this continued partnership and look forward to supporting Blazer engineering co-ops at BioHorizons for many years to come.”

A Blazer Legacy

BioHorizons was started in 1995 by the late Martha Bidez, Ph.D., then a faculty member in the School of Engineering who would serve as the company’s first CEO before selling the company and returning to UAB in 2009. Over the years, the company has hired a number of UAB alumni, including several members of its leadership team (see sidebar).

In 2016, however, the company’s ties to UAB got a little closer when Ashley Boggs became the first UAB undergraduate to join the BioHorizons co-op program—a program that provides students the opportunity to work full-time at the company for three semesters, alternating with school. The experience is paid, and students work alongside engineers throughout their time at the company.

Boggs extended her co-op by working part-time at the company until she was hired full time after she graduated in 2018. Today, she is a Digital Dentistry Engineering Manager, and she credits her co-op experience for opening her eyes to possibilities she had never previously considered.

“I had a vague idea that I wanted to work with implants—like hips, knees, ankles—but I didn’t know anything about the dental-implant industry at all,” said Boggs. “During my sophomore year, I went to the Engineering Career Center and told them that I couldn’t keep sitting in class doing problems from a book. They told me about a local company called BioHorizons that was doing on-campus interviews.”

The interview changed Boggs’s personal career trajectory, but her story is not an unusual one. While the engineering curriculum prepares students for a wide variety of careers, it’s often that first on-the-job experience that opens eyes and doors to career opportunities in fields students may have never been aware of.

That was the case for UAB graduate Jonathan Gordon, another former co-op participant who now works as a packaging engineer for BioHorizons. “I started out on a pre-med track, but coming from a very small town to UAB was a big transition,” Gordon said. “I dropped the pre-med route pretty quickly and started looking for other options.”

Like Boggs, the Engineering Career Center helped connect Gordon with a co-op position at BioHorizons, and that, in turn, led to full-time employment. “I realized pretty quickly that I love this industry. It’s exciting to be a part of this.”

An Undergraduate Pipeline

Although Boggs was the first UAB student hired into BioHorizons' co-op program, she soon had company. Three other Blazers followed her into the program (Josh Moore, Karly Casey and Gordon), and all four stayed on to work full-time. That kind of retention is notable for an undergraduate experience that by its nature is often exploratory.

“Since we started the co-op program about 10 years ago, we have had about 17-18 engineering students in our program—two of which have been in our regulatory department and the rest in research and development,” said Tom Lewis, BioHorizons manager of product engineering. “We feel that it has been very successful, and to date we have hired five as full-time employees.”

That transition from co-op to full-time employee makes sense when you consider the investment BioHorizons makes in students over a three-semester co-op. Each student must learn Quality System processes before getting down to work with tasks, such as design control, drawing release, and CAD modeling. “Each student is trained, but it takes hands-on involvement to learn all of these processes,” Lewis said. “It’s also helpful for students to experience how different departments work together for a common goal.”

In addition, students must learn industry standards and technologies in the medical device industry. “This takes longer,” Lewis said, “but over time they begin to understand the ‘whys’ behind the design of dental implants, restorative components and instruments. Although we have the expectation that co-ops produce for us, my hope is that when they look back they realize the value of their experience here, and as they move into their careers they have a head start in their understanding of engineering organizations."

“Co-op is both an investment by the company and a commitment by the student,” added Adams. “The depth of experience pays dividends in that co-op students are ready to contribute immediately at an organization after graduation.”

“I have been part of teams in which we have drawn and developed state of the art dental surgery kits that are slated to hit the market this year; I have managed drafting and conducting test plans to research the durability of implant designs; and, most importantly, I have been able to teach incoming co-ops the ins and outs of the company and guide them as they grow from a college student into true engineers.”
—Benjamin Pody, mechanical engineering student and 2nd-year co-op

Homegrown Talent

Lewis says the co-op program historically has drawn from several area universities, but he admits UAB students have one obvious advantage. “Since they are local, they already have living arrangements,” he said. “After completing the three co-op terms, students return to school to finish up and graduate. With UAB being in town, when the opportunity was available several UAB students have stayed on and worked part-time until graduation. The company knowledge they have has allowed them to be productive even on a part-time basis.”

While the growth of BioHorizons’ co-op program is exciting for current and future engineering students, UAB School of Engineering Dean Jeff Holmes, M.D., Ph.D., says that is just one of the reasons UAB engineers should look at the BioHorizons story with pride.

“It’s not unusual for a promising startup to spin off from university research—in this case, arising from research in the UAB Schools of Engineering and Dentistry,” said Holmes. “We often comment that these startups have the potential to revolutionize an industry. But in the case of BioHorizons, it has actually done that, and it continues to innovate and to grow. I am tremendously excited that our students are able to be a part of that continuing UAB success story.”

“At BioHorizons, we look forward to continuing our work with UAB in the future,” agreed Lewis. “We appreciate the relationship we have developed with the university that has served us well over the years.”