Faculty profile: Zhanjie Li

It’s all about the numbers.

If an engineer needs to know how a building or a bridge would react to changes in temperature, wind or other variables, they model it under those circumstances and use calculus to determine the change of a given event, such as a collapse. Engineers looking at the speed an object travels on a roadway use calculus to determine the rate at which the speed changes and the acceleration for the trip. Even engineers who are working on robotics need to know how the limbs will move with a given command and use calculus to determine the chance of a limb being in a particular spot at a specific time.

“Like most math, it’s fundamental tools that you use later in life,” says Zhanjie Li, assistant professor of engineering, who joined the faculty this fall. “Most of the mechanics, if you want to study the behavior of a structure, all of that starts with calculus. If you look at the equations we use to study math, all the functions are derived from this.”

Li holds the following degrees, all in civil engineering: Ph.D. from John Hopkins University, M.S. from Harbin Institute of Technology, M.S. from John Hopkins University, and a B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China.

“I love doing research, and I love teaching,” Li says. “I enjoy the combination, so I decided to pursue an academic career.”

Though his expertise is in theoretical and computational mechanics, structural design and analysis of emerging cold-formed steel structures and their sustainability to reduce the environmental and energy footprint of building, Li says that he is interested in the nanotechnology projects that are taking shape at SUNYIT.

“There’s a lot going on here,” Li says. “Quad-C, the Marcy NanoCenter. It’s very exciting. One day I’d like to curve my studies in that direction a bit.”

All of those future scientists and engineers in Li’s classes have several years of study ahead of them, and Li says they will often find their work rooted in the mathematical foundation of calculus.

“From my view as a civil engineer, I hope students understand calculus so that in the next stage of their studies, they’ll be able to handle and understand the next levels of math,” says Li. “They will realize they learned the basics in calculus and will be prepared for what lies ahead.”