Angelique Louie, Ph.D.

Students from the UC Davis Game Development and Arts Club designed a computer game to support Professor Angelique Louie’s online class, “Introduction to Research.” Characters such as Rosalind Franklin and H.G. Wells guide students through weekly challenges to reinforce class topics.

When Professor Angelique Louie needed some help with her online course “Introduction to Research,” she enlisted a little help from experts such as science fiction author H.G. Wells, biochemist Rosalind Franklin and poet Alexander Pushkin.

Well, sort of. Wells, Franklin and Pushkin are among the “nonplayer characters” who inhabit an online game developed to accompany Louie’s course, developed by students from UC Davis’ Game Development and Arts Club.

“Introduction to Research,” BIM 088V, is an exclusively online class taught by Louie, professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis, for the University of California’s Cross Campus Enrollment program. The class was first offered in spring quarter 2018 and enrolled about 125 students, one-fifth of them from outside UC Davis… Continue reading.

Angelique Louie, a professor and vice-chair of the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering, has received a fully paid invitation to attend the National Academy of Engineering‘s annual Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium. The event will take place Oct. 26-29 at the National Academies’ Beckman Center in Irvine, Calif.

All invited participants have been asked to outline their innovative teaching methods on posters displayed during an expo-style symposium, where attendees will circulate and listen to informal presentations from each speaker. Participants also will meet during smaller thematic sessions and panels, in order to collaborate and discuss different educational tools and strategies.

Louie’s proposed methodology acknowledges the retention problems created by traditional lower-division coursework that focuses exclusively on chemistry, math and physics, at the expense of hands-on engineering projects that would better engage undergraduate students and encourage them to embrace this field. At the same time, the growing popularity of the BME major has resulted in larger class sizes that complicate efforts to offer hands-on laboratory and design experiences to each and every student. Louie’s innovative solution will revise the freshman-level Introduction to Biomedical Engineering course by creating “virtual” clinical rotations for a large-class format, in which discussion sections of 30-40 students will learn the rotation experience by viewing short films that have been made in collaboration with the UC Davis Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. The discussion sections will present their findings, after which the entire class will rule out intractable problems and finally select and focus upon a single challenge to be used as a design project.

After Louie earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at UC Davis, she developed an affinity for bio-medical applications while studying fiber optics during her master’s degree work at UCLA. She obtained a doctorate in 1994, at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute, where she concentrated on the biomedical side of optical imaging with lasers. Following post-doc studies at Cal Tech, she returned to UC Davis and joined the College of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2002.

The W.M. Keck Foundation’s Medical Research Program has presented a grant for $1 million to Angelique Louie, a professor and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering. The grant will help fund her project “In Vivo 3D Imaging Using Bioluminescent Gene Reporters and MRI,” which she is undertaking in collaboration with Yohei Yokobayashi, an associate professor also in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; and Jared Shaw, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry.