Dr. Philip Asare

Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education & Practice and Division of Engineering Science at University of Toronto; Co-Owner of Diginera LLC; Co-Founder & Co-Owner of Peace of Mind Technologies LLC

Philip Asare is a researcher, educator, and engineer with a strong interest in how we practice and teach engineering. At the University of Toronto, where he is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education & Practice and Division of Engineering Science, his teaching focuses on engineering design and his project work focuses on systems approaches to address problems in many domains, with his primary domain of application being the medicine, as well as inclusive approaches to engineering education and practice.

Prior to the University of Toronto, Philip was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Bucknell University, where he was awarded the President’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award in the faculty category for significant contributions to the University’s efforts to build and nurture an inclusive campus community, and the Burma-Bucknell Bowl Award for outstanding contributions to intercultural and international understanding.

Philip co-owns two technology companies, one focused on helping small businesses and nonprofits leverage technology to improve their operations and value to stakeholders, and another focused on consumer product development.

Philip was raised in Ghana. He decided to pursue engineering in the hope that in some small way he could use his skills to better the human condition. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his BSE and MSE in Electrical Engineering, he found that there was a significant underrepresentation of minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields in North America. This led him on a quest to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in these fields. For his efforts at Penn, Philip was awarded the Sol Feinstone Undergraduate Award in 2009 for contributions to social and/or educational change within or outside the University of Pennsylvania community, and the Engineering Alumni Society E. Stuart Eichert, Jr student award in 2010 for selfless service to the University and the Community. Philip decided to pursue a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Virginia (UVa) and get into higher education because he felt that in addition to the impact he could make from his own work, he could help train the next generation of STEM professionals to be attentive to issues of the human condition including social justice, equity, and inclusion. His efforts at the UVa earned him the Louis T. Rader Graduate Research Award.

Philip has served on the Technical Program Committee for the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems for the year 2020 and is serving for the year 2021 as well. Cyber-physical systems is a systems discipline focused on the intersection of computing with physical processes, where energy is an important application domain. He has also served as a panelist and reviewer for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in this area, and has been an invited speaker at visioning workshops sponsored by the NSF on medical cyber-physical systems and global engagement in the area of cyber-physical systems. A paper on his collaborative work on increasing participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM was awarded the best paper award at the 2018 Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) International STEM Education Conference.