Faculty Profile: Shekhar Bhansali


This is the sixth article in a series highlighting some of the 124 faculty members who were hired during the 2011-2012 academic year

Shekhar Bhansali’s life has taken him around the world. From his native India to Australia to Japan and finally the United States. Never one to follow the crowd, Bhansali instead chose a path that would test his ingenuity, show him new ways of approaching problems, and teach him lessons about working with people.

“I’m a messed-up engineer,” says Bhansali, now the Alcatel-Lucent Professor and chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at FIU. “My life is not something that’s been planned.”

Today, Bhansali is known as a prolific researcher with 16 U.S. Patents to his credit. He’s published more than 75 published journal papers and 100 conference papers in addition to editing a book and five book chapters. He’s gotten to this point in his career following a path that has taken many turns.

As a young man growing up in India, he saw only two possible careers for himself –doctor or engineer. He never liked biology, so he pursued his bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering from Malaviya National Institute of technology in Jaipur before going to work for an aerospace company. There he got a reality check when he was asked to do a complete aircraft engine overhaul.

“I was like, ‘Look, I didn’t train for this,’” Bhansali recalls. “And the simple answer I got was you’re either a good engineer or you’re not a good engineer. A good engineer can figure the way out. So it was baptism by fire. ”

After receiving a master’s degree in aircraft production engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bhansali moved to Australia, where he found his calling. Picking up a copy of Scientific American magazine from a mentor’s desk, he saw a photo of a gear so tiny it could fit on the foot of an ant. He discovered a passion for nanostructures and microsystems and began pursuing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Bhansali then went to work in Japan. “The whole world goes west, so I decided I’m going to go east,” he explains. It was the most wonderful two years of his life and a great learning experience, he says.

Bhansali came to FIU in 2011 after spending more than a decade at the University of South Florida, where he built a program that was among the top 10 Ph.D. producers for Hispanic Americans and African Americans. While at USF, Bhansali created several research and training programs to increase diversity, retention and graduation rates.

His work as a mentor has been recognized numerous times, including the 2009 and 2011 William R. Jones Outstanding Mentor Award from the Florida Education Fund and the 2009 Mentor of the Year Award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

“Taking an ‘average’ first-time-in-college student and helping them in a career that’s going to change their life…that’s priceless,” Bhansali says. “As they say in the ads, for everything else there is a credit card.”

When Bhansali came to FIU he was immediately impressed.

“FIU is an institution right now that is at the cusp of greatness,” he says. “I was blown away when I came here and saw what was going on in the department.”

The department faculty recently voted on comprehensive changes to admission and curriculum focused on giving all interested students the depth and breadth of education that industry demands by giving them the opportunity to take up to 20 courses as electives.

The department is also working to improve students’ communications skills and partnering with industry so students can work with mentors early on. Bhansali recently reached an agreement with Motorola, which is loaning equipment to the department and providing expertise to train students on state-of-the-art infrastructure.

“What that does is give students a quantum leap,” Bhansali says. “Embedding industrial perspectives and processes in their academic training, they will already know, at the point of graduation, what an employer might expect them to know two years into a job. They’re already closely working with people in industry who are telling them what they need to know today.”

Other faculty members profiled in this series:

Tawia Ansah

David A. Ralston

Margaret Scisney-Matlock

Percy Hintzen

O. Dale Williams