engineering

Pamela Abshire

Pamela Abshire is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Pamela Abshire rather than just read about it. In short: Pamela A. Abshire is an American engineer.

Key takeaways

Pamela Abshire belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Pamela Abshire to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Pamela Abshire from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Pamela A. Abshire is an American engineer. She was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2018 for her contributions to CMOS biosensors.

Early life and education Abshire was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina and raised in Roanoke, Virginia, where she attended the Roanoke Valley Governor's School for Science and Technology from 1985 to 1988. Following this, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology and became a Research Engineer in the Bradycardia Research Department of Medtronic, Inc. In 1995, she enrolled at Johns Hopkins University for her Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Career Upon completing her formal education, Abshire accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in November 2001. Early in her career at UMD, she received the 2003 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. As an assistant professor, Abshire, Benjamin Shapiro, and Elisabeth Smela received the 2005 Invention of the Year award for their invention, "Cell Sensor Based Pathogen Detection." Later, she began working on sensors that take advantage of the sensory capabilities of biological cells. In 2009, Abshire, Smela, and Sarah Bergbreiter won a three-year, $1.5 million NSF grant for Ant-Like Microrobots—Fast, Small, and Under Control. Two years later, she was the co-recipient of the Jimmy H. C. Lin Award for Entrepreneurship along with Marc Dandin and David Sander, "in recognition of their business plan Ibis Microtech, a new entrepreneurial venture aiming to equip medical professionals, food quality control technicians, first responders, and national defense agencies with cost-effective diagnostics devices capable of performing laboratory-grade analyses on-site, and in record time." During her tenure at UMD, Abshire has focused her research on CMOS biosensors; adaptive integrated circuits (ICs) and IC sensors; hybrid microsystems incorporating CMOS, MEMS, optoelectronics, microfluidics, and biological components; low power mixed-signal ICs for a variety of applications, including cell-based sensing, high performance imaging, miniature robotics, spike sorting, adaptive data conversion, and closed loop control of MEMS and microfluidic systems. In 2017, Abshire was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in the A. James Clark School of Engineering's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2018 for her "contributions to CMOS biosensors." During the COVID-19 pandemic, Abshire received funding for her project "Tackling Chronic Pain: Machine Learning-Enabled Biomarker Discovery and Sensing" with Reza Ghodssi and Behtash Babadi. She was later named one of the University of Maryland's 2020-2021 ADVANCE Professors, who "serve as strategic mentors and knowledge brokers for faculty within their college."

Personal life Abshire is a mother.

References

External links Pamela Abshire publications indexed by Google Scholar

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Pamela Abshire

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Pamela Abshire claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Pamela Abshire before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Pamela Abshire ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Pamela Abshire

In research: Pamela Abshire appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Pamela Abshire in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Pamela Abshire is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century American engineers, 21st-century American women engineers, California Institute of Technology alumni, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Pamela Abshire outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Pamela Abshire in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Pamela Abshire means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Pamela Abshire out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pamela Abshire in simple terms?

Pamela A. Abshire is an American engineer.

Why does Pamela Abshire matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Pamela Abshire?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Pamela Abshire.