CIRTL Spotlight: Aya Diab

Katherine Friedrich

As a college student in Cairo, Egypt, Aya Diab was interested in art and machines. “When I was growing up, I was always interested in doing things with my hands and fixing things,” she said.

Diab, a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison Ph.D. graduate and Delta Program participant, described her interest in mechanical engineering vividly and kinesthetically. “A lot of the things we study, you can see around you and you can feel,” she said. “I was very much interested in the flow of fluids and heat transfer and thermodynamics.”

For her graduate work, Diab studied heat transfer in the extreme environment of a nuclear reactor. Her dissertation analyzes an unlikely but dangerous situation in which loss of coolant flow to nuclear fuel rods could melt the metal fuel elements.

“In graduate school, you get a lot of preparation in your field, but there are a lot of skills you’ll need later on that are not offered,” Diab observed. Since her high college grades had earned her the opportunity to enter a tenure-track position in Egypt after graduate school – an unusual situation for a graduate student – she knew that 50 percent of her first faculty job would involve teaching.

The Delta Program provided a venue for Diab to explore new ways of teaching. Through participating in Delta, Diab developed a teaching philosophy and became a more reflective instructor. Her focus changed from transmitting course content to thinking about her students.

“These discussions got me thinking about things I’ve never considered before,” Diab said. “In higher education, you get to grow and mature, and it’s an important time in every person’s life.”

Diab is curious about the diversity her students bring to the classroom. “[Delta] got me to realize how diverse we are, even if we may not look diverse on the outside,” she said. When she begins her new job at Ain Shams University in spring 2008, she plans to use an online learning styles inventory to better understand the diversity of her class at the beginning of the semester.

Diab introduced an exercise to her Delta colleagues that encourages creativity and shows the uniqueness of students’ ideas and backgrounds. During the Delta internship seminar, Diab took out a pack of cards with images on them, and asked her colleagues to each select a card that showed an example of heat transfer. By listening to each person’s explanation of his or her choice, people learned from their peers’ scientific knowledge. “It was an icebreaker and a community builder,” Diab said.

“I think that the Delta Program is doing a huge favor to people in the sciences,” said Diab. Engineers and scientists, she said, tend not to think a great deal about personal interaction. “’People skills’ is one of the very important skill sets,” she concluded.

Oct 30, 2007

CIRTL
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
ph.: 608.263.0630
fax: 608.265.0538