Dr. Maxine Jonas is a Senior Lecturer of Biological Engineering at MIT
On Feb 28th 2023, we spoke with Dr. Maxine Jonas, Senior Lecturer of Biological Engineering at MIT. Her primary responsibility there is to teach an undergraduate class in Bioinstrumentation and Measurements. This interdisciplinary and hands-on class focuses on optics, electronics, and microscopy.
Maxine did not grow up building microscopes, but she was always keen on photography, and math. She earned her undergraduate degree at what she called a general engineering school in France. It was the breadth of applications she saw for biology and an opportunity to learn English a little better that attracted her to MIT in the early 2000s. After earning her PhD in the department where she now teaches, she got a job at a Boston-area instrumentation company. Her job there involved building instruments in-house, and then installing them at customer’s sites all over the world. Her time spent on customer support reinforced what Maxine’s mom always told her: that Maxine enjoyed teaching and was really good at it.
Her university job is not a typical one, but she feels it is a perfect fit. It applies her technical training and her talent in teaching and communicating in a department that makes her feel respected and needed. The details of the work are always changing but always enables her to directly help students become biological engineers.