Bengali appointed executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning
Published Mar 08, 2018Dr. Ashfaq Bengali has been appointed executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning.
The Center for Teaching and Learning brings together three components: the Academic Success Collaborative, the Initiative in Teaching Innovation and Excellence, which Ashfaq has headed since January and will continue to lead, and the Engineering Enrichment Program. Together, the center is designed to develop leaders in engineering and education to focus on one important outcome: to create engineering leaders here in Qatar.
Bengali has been a passionate advocate for excellence and innovation in teaching and was previously named the Dean’s Fellow for Teaching Excellence. In this role, he supported our academic services office in developing programs that focus on enhancing teaching methods to improve the learning experiences of students at Texas A&M at Qatar. This included organizing internal workshops to discuss experiences and enhancements in pedagogical methods and course management. He was the driving force in Texas A&M at Qatar’s first Teaching Week in fall 2016.
Bengali received his B.A. from Carleton College. Following his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory where his research focused on time-resolved infrared photochemistry of organometallic complexes. Before joining Texas A&M at Qatar in 2006, he was associate professor of chemistry at Dickinson College.
Ashfaq succeeds executive director Dr. Troy Bickham, who was instrumental in launching the center last year.