New bioengineering faculty member wants to understand what moves us 

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The Department of Bioengineering welcomed new Assistant Professor Khadija Zaidi this fall. Her background is in examining the effects of neural injuries on body movement, inspired by her longtime interest in the movements of the universe.  

Zaidi recalled a quote that inspired her as a young person: if you want to understand the world, study either anatomy or astronomy. Both fields study movements of the universe, on a micro- and macro-level scale, respectively.  

“It's kind of amazing that things don't go wrong more often based on the amount of movement that happens,” Zaidi said. “There are all these movements and delicate balances, and wanting to study more of that led me to the intersection between biology, or the natural world, and mathematics. That's what brought me to bioengineering.” 

Khadija Zaidi 500x500
Khadija Zaidi

Zaidi studied as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland and earned her doctorate from George Mason last year. As a graduate student, Zaidi studied human movement, drawn to the idea that movement is one of the greatest differentiators between living and non-living.  

“I was very interested in looking at how the brain initiates movement, so my graduate studies focused specifically on how movement changes after stroke or through age," she said. At George Mason, Zaidi’s work in Associate Professor Qi Wei’s biomechanics lab focused on upper extremity movement impairments consequent to neural injuries such as Stroke, and age-related differences in bilateral coordination. 

While Zaidi originally planned to apply her bioengineering degree to a career in health care, she found herself drawn to the work of her professors. “I really fell more in love with the vast amount of knowledge that the professors had, more so than the hands-on medical procedures,” she said. Now, many of the bioengineering students she teaches aspire to careers in healthcare themselves 

This semester, Zaidi is teaching two courses, a bioengineering signals and systems course and a computational modeling and bioengineering course. So far, she has enjoyed the work.  

“I've been really enjoying showing students how to represent real-world problems and be able to use different engineering tools to solve them,” she said. “It's been nice to give them engineering tools and have them use their biology knowledge and put it together and have everything click together.” 

In the future, Zaidi hopes to introduce a biomedical ethics course to the department.  

“As soon as I graduated, I was asked a lot of questions, such as, ‘What is your opinion on stem cells? Your opinion on end-of-life decisions? On any kind of biological enhancement or modification? On GMOs?,” she explained. “These are very popular topics to debate. They are polarizing, and as bioengineers we have a little bit of insight into the processes behind them but may not necessarily have delved into the ethics.  

She sees the value, she said, “for students to get the opportunity to discuss that with faculty before they're in the real world being asked, ‘Oh, you're a bioengineer. What do you think about this?’”