9/16/2026 Megan Altmyer
ECE doctoral student Melody Famil Rasoulian’s research, teaching, and mentorship experiences are preparing her for a career in academia. She is a recipient of the Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship.
Written by Megan Altmyer
The first time Melody Famil Rasoulian conducted fieldwork, she discovered a gap in her engineering education.
“I knew how to design a system. I did not know how to understand the people who would live with it,” Rasoulian said.
That realization has shaped the electrical and computer engineering doctoral student’s research, teaching, and vision for her future. Being selected as a Mavis Future Faculty Fellow in The Grainger College of Engineering, Rasoulian hopes to turn observation into thoughtful practice.
The Mavis Future Faculty Fellows Program is a one-year professional development program for senior Ph.D. students interested in academic careers. The program helps students develop skills in three core areas of faculty life: research, teaching, and mentoring. It also helps students better understand the realities of working in academia.
For Rasoulian, the opportunity comes at a point when those three areas are already becoming interconnected parts of her doctoral experience.
“I get a year of deliberate preparation for all aspects of the academic job,” she said.
From technical solutions to community-centered engineering
Rasoulian’s research focuses on off-grid electrification, particularly in rural and Indigenous communities. Her work examines off-grid solar performance, including energy management and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, while incorporating qualitative insights from the people who use and depend on these systems.
The goal is not simply to design an effective energy system, but to understand what an effective system means for the community it is intended to serve.
“The short version is that I make sure energy systems are planned around the actual needs of the community, rather than decided elsewhere and delivered without their input,” Rasoulian said.
That approach emerged gradually.
When Rasoulian began conducting research with the Contextual Engineering Research Group while working with the Navajo Nation, she initial focused on the technical aspects of off-grid power resources. As she got to know the community, she began to question whether the technology, itself, was well suited to the people it was intended to serve.
Those questions led her toward a broader investigation of energy vulnerability among under-resourced populations and a more creative way of thinking.
“Learning to co-design with people rather than for them is the difference between a temporary deployment and a truly sustainable engineering solution,” Rasoulian said.
Ann Witmer, one of Rasoulian’s doctoral advisors, said that willingness to question assumptions is one of the qualities that distinguishes her as a researcher.
“When I first met Melody, I was struck by her curiosity and openness to new ideas,” Witmer said. “She’s a strong electrical engineer, but she also thirsted for situating that knowledge in real life context.”
Witmer saw that same curiosity when Rasoulian encountered an unfamiliar perspective in her own education.
As a student in a Contextual Engineering course, Rasoulian initially struggled with the course’s emphasis on societal and economic considerations rather than traditional engineering formulas. Instead of dismissing the approach, she dove into understanding how the human experience can shape engineering, ultimately leading a research group in writing papers on ethnographic investigation of technology.
“When Melody saw a gap in her own understanding, she ran toward it rather than rejecting it as irrelevant,” Witmer said. “That expertise not only makes her a stronger engineer, but it’ll also allow her to be a more effective teacher, research mentor, and scholar.”
Learning the craft of teaching
“I used to see teaching as secondary to fieldwork, but watching Dr. Witmer teach changed that completely,” Rasoulian said. “Her discussion-based courses showed me how interactive and engaging engineering education can be.”
Much like the human-centered approach Rasoulian uses in the field, experiencing a dynamic and interactive education helped clarify her path towards academia.
While Rasoulian had served as a teaching assistant in the past, her TA role with Teaching Assistant Professor Olga Mironenko has opened her eyes to the logic behind why assignments are structured in a particular way.
The experience has taken her well beyond simply helping students with course material. Under Mironenko’s guidance, she has worked with course logistics, rubrics, grading and office hours, and eventually began leading class sessions independently.
“What surprised me most was how much of teaching goes beyond delivering content,” Rasoulian said.
Writing rubrics taught her that grading is ultimately about deciding what constitutes meaningful understanding. Office hours taught her the art of guiding students toward an answer through a deep understanding of the material. And leading lectures introduced her to the less technical aspects of teaching, including tone, pacing, body language, and maintaining student engagement.
“Strong technical knowledge is the foundation, but effective teaching requires active delivery,” she said.
Mironenko said Rasoulian quickly demonstrated the initiative and reliability necessary to take on those responsibilities.
“Melody has been an incredible asset for ECE 330,” Mironenko said. “Beyond handling course logistics effortlessly, what really sets her apart is her drive and initiative.”
Mironenko trusted Rasoulian to lead several lecture sessions and watched her confidence and teaching skills develop.
“She is reliable, proactive, and fully deserves this fellowship," Mironenko said. "I genuinely look forward to having her as a colleague in the future."
For Rasoulian, one of the clearest indications that she enjoys teaching came after she led a lesson on her own. When she later graded quizzes covering that material, she saw that the students had performed remarkably well.
“The course material was strong long before I stepped in, but delivering that material effectively had been my responsibility, and I could see the results directly on the page,” she said.
Seeing the bigger picture
The experiences Rasoulian has had thus far have taught her to see teaching as another way of exploring ideas and not something separate from her research.
“What appeals to me most is intellectual agency,” she said of academia. “In academia, you define which problems are worth solving and have the long horizon needed to investigate them deeply.”
She is equally drawn to the way research, teaching, and mentoring can reinforce one another.
The Mavis Program is designed around that same intersection. Fellows work with faculty mentors throughout the year and are required to mentor a less-experienced graduate or undergraduate student, providing opportunities to practice the responsibilities they are preparing to take on as faculty members.
For Rasoulian, that practical preparation is one of the most valuable aspects of the fellowship.
Her current understanding of academia comes largely from observing her own mentors and from her experience as a teaching assistant. The Mavis Program will allow her to see what happens behind the scenes, including how faculty balance teaching, funding, and long-term research strategy.
“I hope Mavis will show me the fuller picture,” she said.
She also hopes to develop a well-grounded teaching philosophy and a clear road map for her academic career.
Building the kind of academic community she wants to lead
Rasoulian’s vision for her future faculty career is closely connected to the mentorship she has experienced as a doctoral student.
Witmer has encouraged her to develop her own research questions rather than simply completing assigned tasks. She has also emphasized that mistakes are an essential part of the research process and that students should have room to discover their own direction.
Rasoulian hopes to bring that same philosophy to her future students.
Five to 10 years from now, she envisions leading a research group where students are encouraged to ask difficult questions, learn from setbacks, and take ownership of their work.
“I want to be the kind of mentor who nurtures students’ own curiosity rather than assigning fixed tasks,” she said.
That student-centered approach reflects what Rasoulian has learned throughout her own journey: good engineering, like good teaching and mentoring, begins with listening.
Through the Mavis Program, there is opportunity to continue developing not only as a researcher, but as the teacher and mentor she hopes to become.
“Ultimately, I want to be recognized not just for the technical quality of our research, but for preparing confident, independent scholars,” she said.
About the Mavis Future Faculty Fellows Program
The Mavis Future Faculty Fellows Program prepares senior engineering Ph.D. students for academic careers through professional development focused on research, teaching, and mentoring. Since the program began, 677 Ph.D. students have participated, and 119 alumni have gone on to faculty positions, as of May 2025.