Coffee With

Pushing the frontiers: A pioneering figure in the field of biomedical engineering, Prof Fouke has had a multifaceted career as a researcher, educator and senior administrator – roles that will stand her in good stead as the Dean of NTU’s College of Engineering.

Ask Prof Janie Fouke how the state of engineering in Singapore can be improved, and she’ll tell you she doesn’t know – yet.

She is the first female engineering Dean in Singapore and, visibly excited about her appointment, has quickly immersed herself in work. “I’m still talking to people and sharing ideas,” she explains. “I will say, however, that I haven’t seen any place as aggressive about pushing the frontiers
as NTU.”

Another reason for her enthusiasm perhaps is that Singapore’s “fast forward” way of doing things suits her to a T. “There’s something about the impatience here that resonates with me,” she explains. “Life is too short; you need to get on with it. What’s your goal? Finish it. Get it done. That’s the
attitude here.”

From farm to lab
The 60-year-old American has had an illustrious career, holding leading positions at universities and federal institutions in the United States. Prof Fouke has previously served as the Senior Advisor to the President at the University of Florida, the Provost at the University of Florida, the Dean of the College of Engineering at Michigan State University and the Division Director at the National Science Foundation, just to name a few.

Born to a farming family in North Carolina, she started working in the fields when she was six years old. The “law of the farm” has greatly informed her sense of purpose and work ethic. “If my task was to feed the animals, for example, I didn’t have the luxury of saying to myself, ‘Well, I’ll wait and do that on Saturday’. I had to work at it every day,” she recalls.

This habit still guides her working life. “Take a small step forward every day,” she says, “and you’ll be amazed by what you can accomplish.”

When she was 15, Prof Fouke convinced her father that her “math skills were worth more than her physical labour”. Though her initial plan had been to study engineering, her mother didn’t want any of her daughters to “wear blue jeans and carry slide rules on their belt”.

So Prof Fouke studied biology at St Andrews College, a liberal arts institution, becoming the first member of her family to get a degree. She’d chosen St Andrews College because it had new laboratory facilities that integrated the teaching of physics, chemistry and biology, and this emphasis on removing boundaries between disciplines fascinated her.

Pioneering paths
Prof Fouke did her graduate studies in biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina, and has been involved in interdisciplinary pursuits ever since. As a biomedical engineer, she sought to apply engineering principles to the life sciences, and spent the early part of her career designing medical instruments that could help answer questions about the human body.

Prof Fouke is particularly proud of her asthma-related research in the 1980s, when she and her colleagues devised an instrument that could be lowered into the airway to find out what happens to patients during an asthma attack. She was among the first to understand that the condition was tied to the swelling of the airway rather than muscle contraction, which researchers had previously believed.

Prof Fouke then began teaching biomedical engineering at several different universities in the 1980s and 1990s. Because biomedical engineering was still a relatively young field, one of the challenges that she and her colleagues faced was finding funds to support their work. “Biomedical engineering fell between the cracks of fundamental science and engineering,” says Prof Fouke. “As a result, neither of these divisions recognised it as part of their domains, and so they weren’t willing to share their funds.”

In 1995, Prof Fouke founded the Bioengineering and Environmental Systems Division at the National Science Foundation, a major source of funding support for science and engineering research programmes in the United States. It was the first time that the federal government had shown recognition and given financial support to the field of biomedical engineering. In her new role, Prof Fouke helped the cash-strapped profession ensure that every dollar was well spent.

Nurturing new shoots: One of Prof Fouke’s goals will be to boost the interest in engineering among the young.

Top of her field
This ability to effectively manage limited resources is what she considers to be one of her biggest achievements at that time. “When I was a young professor, there were only eight accredited biomedical engineering programmes out of the 300 engineering programmes in the United States,” she recalls. “Now there are about 60 or 70, so things have really changed.”

Prof Fouke also acquired the knack for hiring the right person for the right job – something she takes very seriously. “I view my role in hiring and mentoring as having a longer-lasting impact than anything I personally did in the laboratory,” she says. “It’s almost like raising children.”

While professional attributes are critical, Prof Fouke believes that personality is as important to building a cohesive team. “Life is too short. People need to be considerate to one another,” she says.

“Life is too short” – it’s a short, sharp phrase that Prof Fouke repeats several times during the interview, one taught to her through both personal trials and professional challenges.

At 20, while she was still studying, Prof Fouke got married. Her husband had three young children from his previous marriage. Barely out of her teens, she assumed the duties of a mother while still trying to finish college. Perhaps, because she was not much of an adult herself, she enjoyed a very special relationship with her children. Which was why when her eldest son passed away in an accident when he was only 18, it changed the way she lived.

“It is part of how I know that life is impermanent. It is part of how I’ve learnt to be impatient because you don’t have much time,” she says.

When Prof Fouke became the Dean of Engineering at Michigan State University in 1999, there were only five female deans out of the 300 engineering entities in the United States. Today, she no longer thinks about being a woman in her field. “Once you have a few accomplishments under your belt, people respect you and you don’t have to worry about that anymore,” she explains.

The NTU factor
Another attraction for Prof Fouke is that Singapore is an exciting place for engineering because the research institutes here are closely connected with the local industries. This means that the university’s research will directly benefit the economic development of the nation.

At NTU, Prof Fouke is looking forward to rolling up her sleeves and bringing together a diverse faculty team, in order to better serve students. “There’s tremendous potential and I believe I’m a good match at this point in time for NTU,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be a huge challenge.”

What about the common perception that, compared to business and the arts, engineering is a “boring” field?

“Boring!” she exclaims with a laugh. “That’s only because most people haven’t yet learnt how relevant engineering is to their lives. In some of the older engineering disciplines, we either didn’t tell that story well, or it was a difficult story to tell.”

Prof Fouke believes that getting the students to understand engineering at an earlier age, whether it is through stories or robotics competitions, will raise interest in the field and change people’s perceptions. “This will be one of my responsibilities too,” she says. “The opportunities before us are vast!”