Junior Faculty Spotlight: Brett Byram
Each month, the CFT highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Brett Byram, Biomedical Engineering, talks about his teaching philosophy and interests.
Ultrasound is the most used medical image method in the United States, but it’s notorious for making terrible, uninterpretable images. Because of this a significant focus in my lab is on making ultrasound reliable and interpretable in all patients. We accomplish this through a number of means including combinations of new ultrasound pulse sequencing and signal processing approaches. Our approaches have led to 10x improvements in image quality. At Vanderbilt, I teach courses covering bioacoustics and ultrasonic imaging to graduate and undergraduate students and I teach data analysis and statistics to undergraduate engineering students. In my undergraduate course I am exploring methods for exposing students to open ended problems with no definitive answer. The goal is to provide environments where students are empowered to create and then answer their own questions. In the data analysis course this is accomplished by providing students with large, real data sets that allow students to pose their own hypotheses that are interesting and relevant to each of them and then develop experiments and analysis to test their hypotheses.
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