SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2024: Poly – Zhanjie Li

Dr. Zhanjie Li is currently a Professor in the Civil Engineering program and Chair of the engineering department at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. His research specialty is in the area of structural engineering with a focus on computational modeling, structural stability, structural optimization, cold-formed steel structures, green buildings, wind turbines, and machine learning applications. In his research, he devoted his study to simulating the complex behavior of steel members or structures using high-fidelity computational models and developing new computational methods and tools for buckling analysis of thin-walled members such as constrained Finite Strip Method and computational tools such as CUFSM, as one of the key developers, that has been widely used by researchers and engineers. Students in the class are also getting a chance to explore these numerical tools as an applied learning opportunity. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), American Institute of Iron and Steel (AISI), and State University of New York (SUNY). Students can track the advanced development related to Advanced High high-strength Steel (AHSS) and other interesting technologies in structural designs.

In his teaching, he has always been actively exploring new teaching techniques to implement in engineering courses. He was an innovation fellow in the SUNY High Impact Learning and Teaching Hub (HILT) to promote and enhance applied learning and integrated research into the Finite Element Analysis course with HILT’s funding. In addition, he has been actively seeking opportunities to expand the applied learning experiences to broaden the engineering curriculum. For instance, he has been PIs on several workforce training grants funded by SUNY and New York State to develop new educational opportunities for students on LEED certification and wind turbine analysis and design. Those courses, all upper-division courses at 400 levels, are offered as online courses to not only serve SUNY Poly students but also the whole SUNY students. The flexibility of online teaching makes course offerings and the planned course content more accessible to students independent of the geographical location. For some courses, the online option can be more favorable, especially for those applied demonstration courses – such as software and computational tools applications.