Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Jenny Amos

 

Jenny Amos photo

Meet Dr. Jenny Amos, Associate Professor in the Bioengineering Department at UIUC. After completing her BS in Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University, Amos went on to complete her PhD in Chemical Engineering with a focus in Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of South Carolina. During her graduate education, she was immersed in a teaching position that provided her with the opportunity to teach full time, two days per week. Through this experience she found her passion for education, and currently studies research assessment strategies for measuring student learning. The Global Health Initiative (GHI) approached her for a collaboration in 2014, and she was immediately interested in being involved! Since then she has taken multiple trips to Njala University in Sierra Leone, and undertaken two PhD students in Computer Science at Njala. She advises these students mostly through skype and through her interactions during her visits, and has found this to be one of her most rewarding experiences with GHI. In the Spring, she will be teaching Introduction to Sustainable Engineering, which is an online course focused on human centered design. Through this course, students will have the opportunity to identify and define the needs of a community and produce a wiki project to address these needs. She hopes that students will be engaged in designing original ideas to solve ethical, social, and political problems. For more information about Dr. Amos, please visit her faculty page at https://bioengineering.illinois.edu/directory/profile/jamos.