Bahar Memarian

Bahar Memarian shares that a vibrant engineering community and the potential for transforming engineering education are among the attractions that have drawn her to Arizona State University.

“Students play a key role in pedagogy and identifying gaps and potential within engineering design strategies and practice,” she says.

In the engineering design courses she will teach, Memarian plans to provide students with what she describes as “an experiential and interdisciplinary learning environment with self-reflection and creative thinking about engineering design.”

Memarian emphasizes that the landscape of education is changing, particularly with the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, or AI. She finds that facilitating student-centered and collaborative means of learning may be a helpful approach to modern engineering education. 

“AI applications and algorithms may be used in education by different user groups such as students and instructors, as such the existing educational praxis is getting revolutionized with little awareness about how and when AI may be used,“ she says.

She adds that there are concerns about the unforeseen drawbacks, including but not limited to the fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of education with technology such as AI.

“More research and discussions are thus needed to understand how AI may be used for good and not bad when employed as part of educational processes or products,” Memarian says.

Beyond her teaching duties, she aims to contribute to engineering education and higher education research as well as service.

Memarian says she finds that “studying the current landscape of higher education and engineering education can help students learn from research, inform pedagogy and characterize what defines integrated engineering education.”

Among her interests and sources of enjoyment are following the work of research scientists, authors, designers, artists and creators more generally.

Meet the newest faculty members of the Fulton Schools of Engineering here.

Written by Joe Kullman