Brian Aull

 

 

Background and research interests

 

Brian Aull is a Technical Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced Imager Technology Group.  He develops solid-state image sensors that count or time stamp single photons.   He serves as an instructor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Tufts.  He earned his Bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1977 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1985.

 

Teaching at Tufts

 

Prof. Aull teaches ES3 (circuit analysis) in the fall semester and EE113 (semiconductor devices) in the spring semester.   In the spring of 2016, he teaches EE18 (electromagnetic fields and waves).   In the fall of 2014, he was a CELT Faculty Fellow.

 

Teaching Philosophy

 

The word education comes from educe, which means to draw out something that is already there.  As such, education is a process rather than a finished product.  It’s a relationship between teacher and student. The student is not an empty receptacle into which a teacher pours a bucket of knowledge.   Rather, learning is something the student does, and the teacher's role is to guide and facilitate the process.   Here are Aull’s seven principles of effective teaching:

 

1.  To teach is to learn.  I put myself in my students' shoes and think about what may not be obvious to them, even though it is obvious to me.   This forces me to re-explain the material to myself more clearly and convincingly.  I gain deeper understanding and can better convey it to students.

2.  Find the simplicity.   Many of the deepest insights in science are astonishingly simple. I seek to explain each subject in a way that a scientifically illiterate person or even a child could understand.

3.  Have the student use the whole brain.   Science can be approached through logic and symbolic mathematics and also through pictures and visualization. I use both in teaching, because the best learning occurs when the left and right sides of the brain work in concert.

4.  Use the familiar to introduce the unfamiliar.   I use analogies extensively to explain scientific and technical concepts.

5.  Help students connect seemingly separate knowledge domains.  A class about electronic circuit analysis introduces physical concepts and mathematical methods that recur in other branches of engineering and science.  Resonance and damping occur, for example, in an RLC circuit, but also in an optical interferometer or a mechanical tuning fork.

6.  Students learn by doing.  I devote some class time to having students break up into pairs or groups to work on a problem or answer a brain-teaser question.    Active learning works best. 

7.  Connect genuinely with the students.   When I have a class of 40+ undergraduates, I learn every student's name and make time to meet one-on-one with them.

 

Citizenship and public service

One of Aull’s core interests is the renewal of democratic life in the United States.   He is the author of a book, The Triad: Three Civic Virtues That Could Save American Democracy.  The writing of the book grew out of his concern about partisan bickering, pervasive political corruption, and the breakdown of trust in governing institutions.   Here are the three virtues referred to in the book’s subtitle:

 

1. Democracy is often defined in terms of what we each get from the system. A society is considered “democratic” if each citizen gets a fair slice of the "pie" in terms of public benefits. A healthy democracy, however, is just as much about what each of us contributes to the well being of the society. This is an ethic of service, that is, each citizen takes ownership of his or her role as a source of solutions to problems.

 

2. Democracy is often defined in terms of having one’s voice heard. But little attention is paid to the quality of the discourse. It might be an angry shouting match, but it's "democratic" if everyone is equally loud. A healthy democracy, however, has discourse in which people seek to gain insight from each other and discover solutions in a collaborative spirit. This is an ethic of civic learning.

 

3. Democracy is often defined as a system that protects the freedom of the individual. This is legitimate, but the exaltation of individualism causes us to overlook the power of community. When we build networks of relationships, and especially when they bridge divides such as race or class, something powerful happens. People can be different, but they work together in a way that draws on diverse talents and resources.

 

The renewal of democratic life is based on these three civic virtues:  service, learning, and community.  The Triad presents real-world examples where the exercise of these virtues contributed to successful problem solving.  More information about the book and commentaries about related issues can be found at the book’s website.