Wang named new Director of Undergraduate Studies

Clinical Associate Professor Zhinan Wang has been named the new director of undergraduate studies for the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering. He takes over this role from Associate Professor John Hetling, who has held the role for the last 22 years. Hetling stepped back from the role to focus more on his research endeavors in the department.

Upon stepping into the role, Wang is no stranger to what it takes to fulfill the role of DUGS, as he constantly has his office door open for students because he teaches so many different level courses.

“In doing so, students feel very comfortable talking to me—including anything they are concerned about or they’re struggling with,” he said. “Those teaching in the department are seeing students every day. You need to understand them, know them, see them, teach them, and once they know you, they will trust you.”

Wang added that his teaching style also means he works with the students all the time, and in doing so, the students feel confident in their work. His teaching styles incorporates active teaching and learning, project-based, team-based, and a hands-on approach and Wang as part of this whole community to learn. His approach means that students not only learn from him, but Wang also learns from them.

“This opportunity will give me a chance to rethink how to teach engineering students,” Wang said.

Wang noted that although he only graduated with an engineering degree, he’s striving to be a better educator and help students understand complex engineering topics in more efficient and fun ways than he learned while in school.

“Students have so much to balance during their college experience including homework, planning their courses, future careers, studying, their social lives,” Wang said. “A DUGS has to help with all of this. My teaching style requires me to work with the students all the time, and I’ve found that after I do this the students feel very confident and know when and where to ask questions.”

Wang noted he is lucky enough to have the assistance of Hetling to introduce him to the role.

“John has been helping me to get familiar with the DUGS position, which is very precious,” he said. “So, it’s been a very smooth transition with lots of teamwork throughout the whole department.”

Wang emphasized how important the job is and how big his responsibility is, even when it comes to students simply coming to him for a signature to apply for graduation. He added students rely on their department to have their entire college experience result in graduation and success guaranteed.

Wang is hoping to engage more with other BME programs as director. As biomedical engineering is a frequently evolving field and program, he’s hoping to learn more about how he can better help students and answer their questions and concerns. He wants students to feel calm when they enter his office and to be able to go to him every time they have problems or questions to be answered.

He also is already working to update and revise the curriculum to keep up with the changing BME landscape.

“Zhinan was a great candidate, and he’s very enthusiastic about the role,” Hetling said. “He’s a trained ABET reviewer and is already involved in a lot of committees; he probably does more teaching than anyone else in the department right now. He took over those roles that I had for decades, and one at a time, I was handing them off, and he was absorbing everything and doing a great job, so it’s a very easy, comfortable transition.”

Hetling shared that the change in DUGS was motivated by him wanting to focus more on research and it felt like the right time to transition out to somebody new.

He joined the department after graduating from UIC with his PhD in biomedical engineering and neuroscience in 1997, and shortly after, he became a full-time faculty member. At the time of his transition to DUGS, there were only two other faculty members, one of whom was also the director of graduate studies, and the department head.

Throughout his 22 years as DUGS, Hetling has overseen seven major curriculum revisions and three ABET accreditation visits. He has even helped developed and taught 14 different courses.

He noted that he’s also come across every conceivable problem during his time as DUGS.

“Part of the ongoing reward from this job is helping students with their problems and finding a way through,” Hetling said. “When they come into my office, and they’re distraught, they think there’s some insurmountable barrier standing between them and what they have to do to complete their degree, you find a way through it or show them that it’s not as bad as they first thought or you realize something is possible and then solving those case study problems one at a time.”

“My priorities were very consistently to always do what was in the best interest of the student,” Hetling said. “I always wanted to be an advocate for the student and sometimes that meant enforcing the rules, sometimes that meant stretching the rules, and sometimes that meant changing the rules entirely. I’ve gone to bat for students in all three different ways and we’ve made catalog changes, or we’ve encouraged other departments to change their catalog when it was causing these problems.”

One of the most important parts of Hetling’s job as DUGS was to always try to be very approachable so that students could be open, and that helped him understand what the curriculum looks like from their perspective and that made him a better teacher.

“I’ve always had undergraduate researchers in my lab, and because of this, I got to know undergraduate students pretty well,” he said. “I was very comfortable welcoming them into the lab and it was rewarding seeing them get some research experience. Some of them were even significant contributors to different research projects. An anecdote that I tell a lot of students is I had a first-semester freshman who joined my lab and she worked for me for four years, stayed on as a master’s student for three more years, and then she went to Northwestern Medical School, stayed there for her ophthalmology residency, went to Harvard University for an ophthalmology retinal fellowship, and now she’s a pediatric ophthalmologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.”

Since Hetling has stepped back from his role as DUGS, he’s also focusing more on his startup, RetMap, Inc. The company strives to protect people’s vision with cutting-edge medical devices for screening and diagnosing neurodegenerative eye conditions and improve eye care through ground-breaking designs of electroretinography electrodes for veterinary and human use.