Jifu Tan, PhD Mechanical Engineering ’15: Teaching as he was taught

A Lehigh PhD now guides his own students in the same spirit he was mentored, even using his former professor’s textbook in his own classroom.

Finding Lehigh

Jifu Tan’s path to Lehigh began with a change of plans. He had originally enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2009, but he moved to Lehigh the following year with his advisor.

As an undergraduate, Tan wasn’t especially passionate about his major. He wanted to work with “high technology,” and began thinking more carefully about what he enjoyed: math, mechanics, and programming.

That self-assessment led him toward numerical methods for solving equations that describe physical phenomena and toward a professor whose research aligned with those interests.

A small campus, a close community

Tan found Lehigh’s compact campus and close-knit research community particularly appealing. His lab included Chinese, American, Turkish, Iranian, and Indian students across several graduating classes, creating a diverse community that extended well beyond the classroom.

There was plenty of time for fun, too. When his advisor left for the evening, labmates would form two-person teams for video games in adjoining lab rooms, trading good-natured trash talk through the shared wall. Tan played basketball at least twice a week and took advantage of Lehigh After Dark, which gave students opportunities to stay active and socialize through late-night recreation.

That balance helped make the demands of doctoral study sustainable, Tan says: a small-town setting, a supportive lab community and friends with whom he could unwind.

A class that still pays off

Some of Tan’s most valuable lessons at Lehigh came from pushing himself beyond the minimum requirements. He chose the more challenging graduate section of a parallel computing course, even though the undergraduate version would have satisfied his requirement. The workload was intense, with projects that sometimes kept him up past 3 a.m.

The investment paid off. The CPU- and GPU-based computing techniques he learned in the course in 2011 and 2012 are still central to his research in biological fluid mechanics, where he relies on large-scale computing.

He also remembers a fluid mechanics professor at Lehigh who wrote his own textbook and eventually made it available free online. Tan still has his copy—and today, teaching fluid mechanics himself at Binghamton, he uses that same textbook in his own classroom.

How Lehigh prepared him for a career in science

After completing his PhD, Tan was offered postdoctoral positions at both Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania; he chose Penn, staying closer to the network he’d built at Lehigh. He became an assistant professor and later was promoted to an associate professor at a university in Illinois before joining the mechanical engineering faculty at The State University of New York at Binghamton, a public ivy, where he’s now an assistant professor.

Three other faculty members in his department are also Lehigh PhDs who Tan didn’t personally know before he arrived. To him, that’s a telling detail: a research university hired him and his colleagues on the strength of Lehigh’s training and reputation alone, not personal connections. Lehigh’s Rossin Doctoral Fellows program gave him some of the concrete skills behind that reputation: Practical training in academic writing, networking, and teaching that he still draws on today.

But what left the deepest mark, Tan says, was less a specific skill than a model: how Lehigh’s professors taught, how they treated and mentored their students, and who they were as people. That model of teaching and mentorship is what he says he’s carried most directly into his own research and his own classroom.

His advice: Take ownership of the decision

Tan is direct about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to studying abroad. If the motivation comes primarily from a parent, he says, the challenges of the experience can become a source of regret rather than growth.

He also believes students benefit from reaching out to professors directly and early, rather than waiting. And he’s skeptical of the idea that a university’s name alone determines a student’s success.

A student who is motivated enough to earn an opportunity, he says, is likely to make the most of the resources available to them wherever they study.

Nearly two decades after leaving China, Tan sees his Lehigh experience as more than a credential. It gave him habits that have continued to shape his career: curiosity, self-direction and a willingness to take the harder path.

Now, in his own classroom and lab at Binghamton, he is passing that same model of teaching and mentorship on to his own students.