Engineering professor rewarded for multidisciplinary work

Biomedical Engineering (BME) professor and department creator Vo Van Toi is the recipient of the 2004 Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising.

The award is given out every year to a member of the Tufts community. Every four years, a professor from the School of Engineering is the recipient.

Vo will be presented with the award at the annual ceremony on April 16.

Dean of the School of Engineering Linda Abriola made the final decision in the award process. "I was really impressed to see his wonderful teaching record. He has contributed immensely to the School of Engineering in helping to develop the BME undergraduate second major curriculum. We are very fortunate to have him here," she said.

Vo said that his teaching habits have always placed the student first. "Each student is very special to me. I take time and effort to know each student personally. Teaching is demanding. Not only do you have to master what you teach, but you also have to understand the students," he said.

Current BME Department chair David Kaplan credits Vo with the growth of the BME department at Tufts. "The culmination of his dream has been the formation of the department," Kaplan said.

The Leibner Award focuses on a professor's educational impact on students,

based on his or her advising and student leadership.

The BME department has become increasingly popular each year, with a tenfold

increase over the past decade. The graduating class of 2003 saw 40 BME majors, with over half of the students from the School of Liberal Arts. Of last year's BME majors, 50 percent were also women.

Vo serves as the advisor to almost every BME major.

Vo has created and taught six new courses in the field of BME, evidence of his primary focus on teaching. He has taught five classes each academic year and one class each summer since 1995.

His goal, he said, is to not only teach the material to the students, but also to prepare them to work in the field of engineering.

Although Vo considers research to be important to the academic community, he maintains that teaching should always be a professor's central focus. "Research is more of a personal honor, but I think teaching should be a priority," he said.

An example of his hands-on teaching style in engineering is that Vo worked with a group of students to build a fully functioning solar car in 1990. They entered the car in the 1990 "American Tour de Sol," a 234-mile solar car race from Montpelier, Vt. to Boston, placing third.

Outside of the classroom, Vo carries his enthusiasm over to extra-curricular activities, serving as the advisor of three student clubs at Tufts: the Biomedical Engineering Student Club, the Vietnamese Student Club, and the Solar Car Student Club

. Vo has also done substantial work to spread the field of Biomedical Engineering to Vietnam through a virtual program that aims to train educators to instruct students and engineers in Vietnam. This program is part of Vo's initiative to enhance BME research in Vietnam and to encourage cooperation between the American and Vietnamese scientific communities.

Every department, within both the Liberal Arts and Engineering schools, is encouraged to nominate one professor every year. Prior to Vo's involvement in the BME department, he worked within the Department of Electrical Engineering through Sept. 2002.

For this reason, the Electrical Engineering department also played a substantial role in his nomination.

"I've seen professors put on their resume that they were nominated for the Leibner Award, rather than winning it, so it's really a mark of distinction among all the faculty," said professor Robert Gonsalves, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and 2000 award recipient.

While still working in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Vo created the BME minor. An undergraduate second major in BME followed in 1999. Finally, Vo established the graduate program in Biomedical Engineering in 2000.

In 2002, he left the electrical engineering department to help establish the new Department of Biomedical Engineering.

In addition to his work in the BME department, Vo has helped direct, advise, and develop the curricula for two combined engineering programs: the Engineering Medical Degrees program, a 1996 joint effort between the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, and the Engineering Dental Degrees program, a combined program between the School of Engineering and the School of Dental Medicine that has existed since 1998.

-- Dan Keesing contributed to this article