Student spotlight: Ali Asger

"I am more than a thousand miles away from home, but I still don't feel like I'm out of place," says Ali Asger. A mentorship program organized by the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Association (ChEGSA) eased his first year.

"You don't feel isolated," says Asger, a chemical engineering Ph.D. student. "People are right there to provide the resources you need."

Social events in the department, like the weekly ChEGSA happy hours, bring together Ph.D. students from different research groups. Asger says he has learned as much from his peers as he has from his first year of research. It's an environment in which he's grown more confident.

Asger, who is co-advised by Carl Laird and Grigorios Panagakos, works with algorithmic discrete optimization problems. "It has a lot of combinatorics," he says. "It's fun. Each day, I'm solving new puzzles."

He chose the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon because of its strength in process systems engineering. So that students from a variety of backgrounds have the opportunity to join him, Asger has served as a mentor in a second ChEGSA mentorship program. Any Ph.D. applicant can sign up to be paired with a current ChemE grad student for a one-hour informal conversation before the application deadline. As a mentor, Asger has reviewed and provided constructive feedback on his mentee's CV and application essays.

"Everyone does not have the same access to information and resources. People may struggle with their application, irrespective of how skilled they are," he says. ChEGSA strives to pair each mentee with a mentor who can understand where they are coming from. Asger thinks the program can help show prospective students from different parts of the world that they can make it, too. He also independently mentors students at his undergraduate alma mater in India as they navigate the application process for graduate school in the US.

Asger became interested in chemical engineering in high school, when he saw chemical engineers solve complex problems using physics, math, and computers. To build the programming expertise that he wanted as an undergraduate at the Institute of Chemical Technology, he had to look outside his courses. Asger taught himself web development, app development, and machine learning.

He then found a data science internship with a startup in Spain that makes biochar out of olive mill waste. Asger worked on an analysis of drought regions, and then applied his chemical engineering training to help with the engineering of their pilot plant. The internship inspired Asger to pursue a career in research.

Asger believes that showing people what's out there can open new paths. As an undergraduate, he wanted to share his perspective on using mathematical methods to solve engineering problems, so he gave a guest lecture in an introductory math modeling class. "I wanted younger students to see the kind of research that can come out of the things they were learning in the course," he says.

During a summer as a visiting research intern at the University of Waterloo, Asger began using optimization. He immediately wanted to learn more about it. As he started reading papers in the field, Asger kept finding links to Carnegie Mellon's Department of Chemical Engineering. "I knew exactly that this is where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do," he says.

That resolution was a long time coming for Asger, who says that he dabbled in a lot of things growing up. When his mom encouraged him to master one thing, Asger decided to be a musician. In high school, he played bass guitar in a rock band. The band split up when people moved away, and Asger shifted his attention to engineering.

He recognizes how fortunate he was to have those choices. "Where I come from in India, a lot of people don't have that freedom to just wake up one day and say, 'This is what I'm going to do,'" he says. When Asger decided to pursue an advanced degree in chemical engineering, his mom fully supported him. He will be the first person in his family to earn a Ph.D.