Two new professors make engineering more human

Michelle Choi Ausman’s road to engineering education was winding: biomedical engineering, English and psychology minors, a technical-writing internship at the guitar maker Ernie Ball Music Man, where she digitised the know-how of factory-floor workers, and a PhD on how students experience engineering. She joins Tandon as an industry assistant professor in general engineering and focuses on the first-year experience, hoping to build skills, confidence and a sense of belonging in equal measure.

Aarati Akkapeddi, an artist, technologist and educator, joins the Integrated Design & Media programme. They treat the boundaries between art, design and technology as doorways. One project, about intergenerational memory and a family member’s memory loss, trained a machine-learning model on family photographs; the generated images resemble the originals while diverging from them, memory as approximation.