Professor Ting Tsui is a well-known and well-respected professor from the Chemical Engineering department, loved by his students for his fun-loving attitude and evident enthusiasm for his classes. Completing his education in the United States, then working in the semi-conductor fabrication industry, he soon moved to Canada to pursue his research at the University of Waterloo.
This month, the Iron Warrior took some time to get to know this awesome professor a little more personally.
Here’s what he had to say:
Which courses do you teach?
This semester I am teaching NE 100 (Introduction to Nanotechnology Engineering). It’s going pretty good, first years are always fun, and this is my first time teaching this course. This year we are focusing on public speaking and technical report writing, in addition to other technical topics. In the past I have also taught NE 113 (Introduction to Computational Methods), NE 318 (Mathematical Methods for Nanotechnology Engineering), CHE 121 (Engineering Computation), and CHE 241 (Materials Science and Engineering).
Why did you choose to pursue a career in Engineering?
It’s just a lot of fun. I still remember my first engineering project was when my dad gave me an old phone and said “Here, take it apart and have fun with it.” When I say old phone, I’m talking about 30 or 40 years ago. Those phones had bells in it and lots of mechanisms, so you can take the whole thing apart with a screwdriver. I still remember I was about 6 years old and I was so fascinated by it. I also thought it was so cool when my mom showed me that when you use a magnification glass and put it under the sun, you can actually burn things! I’m sure most kids are like that; they become interested by taking things apart and finding out how it works.
What is your favourite part about being a lecturer?
It’s just fun and relaxing. Handing out candies, seeing everybody enjoying themselves, it’s great.
What are your current research interests?
Right now I do research on small scale mechanical properties- basically having small structures and understanding how the materials’ mechanical properties change as the size shrinks to the nanometer scale. I’ve been doing that for years, and now I’m also starting to work with bacteria and looking at cell adhesion on surfaces. The surface will have different topographies, so we want to see how the cells attach to different topographies. The reason is because with a lot of bio-implants, one of the problems when you implant your surface is that bacteria may adhere to the surface and an infection might develop.
What was your favourite memory as an undergraduate student?
I studied in South Carolina at Clemson University. It was a long time ago but one of the greatest things, which you guys don’t have now, was that we had all you can eat food all the time. We would go to the cafeteria all day and we just kept eating and eating. We had all you can eat fried chicken and all the classic southern American food, it was so great. Fried chickens, beef liver, chicken liver, oh it was so good. It’s like you work so hard; the next best thing other than sleep is eating a lot.
Clemson was also a good NCAA football school. That was another exciting thing when I was in undergrad, because for American football, they have their stadium that can hold more than 80 000 people, not like our stadium here. So on the weekend you had thousands of people just come in to the stadium and it was a lot of fun.
Do you have any hobbies?
Well, it’s one of the things that change from before and after you have a child. Before, I loved scuba diving and underwater photography. I’ve scuba-dived in Hawaii, California, Florida, Sicily, just here and there, whenever I can find water that’s not murky. I do a lot of lake diving too. My best and craziest experience was diving with sharks in the Bahamas. This guy is like feeding sharks right in front of you and you have about 10, twenty-foot sharks just swimming around you. I’m surprised I’m still alive.
I used to travel around a lot as well; that is another thing that’s different before and after childbirth. My wife won’t let me out of town now, she hides my car keys and passport – no I’m just joking. But before I came to Waterloo, I was working in Belgium in Europe for a few months. If you look at Belgium on the map, it’s almost in the middle relative to the rest of Europe. So you have whole weekends to travel across Europe, and it only cost about 100 euros round trip.
Since I’ve had my child, I haven’t really had a chance to do that anymore, but playing with kids is also a lot of fun, especially when they’ve learned to walk.
Do you have any advice for your students?
Well most of you guys are pretty smart, so by the time you get here you know how to study. One of the things that I think you have to start thinking about now is the career move; where to get a job, if you are going to grad school, things like that. For example, it seems like today you’ll be ok with a Bachelor’s degree but in another 20 years it may become the norm to have some sort of Master’s level, since so many people are in graduate school now. So I just want to encourage students not to just look a little bit ahead, like what am I going to do in the next 5 years after graduation, but more like when you have a wife or husband, kids, things like that.
Another advice I have is to gain some travel experience. I know some students who have graduated from here and gone to Europe or California for graduate school. So it’s nice, it’s like you get tired of Waterloo’s cold weather and snow, and then you can go travel somewhere new.
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