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Office Artifacts: Mo Khalil

ENG assistant prof shares ways he engages with students

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Although some faculty shy away from teaching large lecture-hall classes, they appeal to Ahmad (“Mo”) Khalil, a College of Engineering assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

“I like to teach the big undergrad classes,” says Khalil, who can be found leading ENG’s control systems in biomedical engineering and thermodynamics and statistical mechanics courses. “Undergrads are a lot of fun. If you bring energy to the big, undergrad core engineering courses and you keep them interactive instead of classic lecture-based, students respond really well.”

An expert in synthetic biology and antibiotic resistance, Khalil recently won a 2016 New Innovator Award sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project that will focus on developing new, more rapid techniques for diagnosing antibiotic resistance to better manage and treat infections. Members of his lab use synthetic biology to understand cells’ molecular basis for solving computational and information-processing problems; they then use that information to create genetic programming languages that allow them to engineer cells for a range of therapeutic and diagnostic applications.