From Player to Professor: Loya's Engineering Journey Through Basketball

But for former Union women’s basketball standout Amy Loya ’14, she has proven that she is up to any task. It’s all part of a long road that started 10 years ago when she came to Schenectady from Bethel, Conn., as a first-year student.

When she first stepped onto campus, a career in academia wasn’t necessarily the first thing on Loya’s mind. But it wasn’t completely out of the question either.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I kept an open mind. I pursued initiatives that interested me at the time, and I took advantage of opportunities Union presented to help me navigate my path,” Loya said. “I considered graduating from Union and pursuing a job in industry, probably in the biomedical device industry. But then another part of me didn’t feel like I was done learning and I wanted to specialize in something.”

Some others on campus, however, had more concrete feelings on her career path.

“I think even before she graduated, I told her that she really should try to be on our faculty,” recalled head women’s basketball coach Mary Ellen Burt. “I want to say I was the one that called it – I told her that you need to be a professor, and you need to come back to Union because you’ll be great for the people here.” 

“I always thought Amy would go into teaching,” added Kelsey McDonald ’14, a fellow tri-captain on the women’s basketball team and one of Loya’s closest friends. “Amy is a people person but she is a difference maker. She's passionate about her career and it's always been clear she has the ability to exude her passion onto others.”

That type of relationship is the hallmark of a Union education and also one of the many reasons why Burt (among others) saw academia as a career path for Loya after graduation.

“I kept telling her ‘Amy, you need to be around people. You have such great people skills, you can’t live your life just in a laboratory doing research,’” Burt remembered. “The way that she coaches and teaches is really meeting people where they are and if they’re not finding the way, she’ll find a different way to teach them or coach them.  She is a natural.”

Finding different ways to teach and being adaptable is something that is coming in handy these days. Loya’s start at Union has been unconventional, beginning on a temporary basis during the winter and spring terms as a fill-in for one of her mentors, Professor Currey. And her first full trimester on staff is coming during the COVID-19 crisis.

“We were laughing because so many things have happened,” Loya recalled. “In addition to the effects of COVID-19, I was simultaneously teaching for the first time and finishing up my Ph.D. and interviewing for this visiting assistant professor position. Other professors in the department were joking that this is the longest job interview ever – we just keep throwing tests at you.”

Loya is still in the midst of finishing her thesis, but her lab work and experimental work are mostly complete. With just some data analysis and thesis writing left, she was supported by her advisor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to take on this new challenge. One of the silver linings of the pandemic has been the ability to have all her meetings online, which eliminates the need to drive between Schenectady and Troy on a daily basis.

Then of course, there is the teaching. After leading only one class while filling in for Professor Currey last trimester, Loya is teaching three classes this spring. She is co-teaching one course on engineering graphics, while also teaching two classes on her own: Biomechanics II, a core course that applies engineering principles to the motion of the human body, and Orthopaedic Biomechanics, an upper-level elective that looks at the mechanical properties of the musculoskeletal system and treatments available for injuries.

“It’s definitely a heavy course load,” admitted Loya. “I think that is a testament to the strength of the biomedical engineering program at Union. Union was named a Top 5 STEM school for women and a Top 25 school for undergraduate engineering. Interest in the major is growing and I’m honored to work alongside professors who teach classes in a variety of research areas.”

COVID-19 has made things more challenging for many of Union’s professors, who rely heavily on face-to-face interaction. For those teaching in the sciences that rely on labs, that challenge has been amplified.

“There’s no template to deal with this. We’ve had to get creative to replace some of the course modules and labs. For my Biomechanics II class, there are case studies and open source computer programs that can simulate some of the experiments that we would be doing on campus. The academic community as a whole has been really supportive of each other so that we can incorporate new tools into our curriculum.”

Loya attempts to have synchronous lectures and group meetings as much as possible, in order to emulate the liberal arts education that Union is built on. However, factors such as time differences and part-time jobs make that difficult for some students and necessitate the need for some prerecorded lectures and assignments. 

McDonald noted that Loya’s best quality on the court was her ability to do whatever was necessary to put her team in the best possible situation to win. As a professor, that requires adapting your curriculum and teaching methods to best suit your situation.  

Loya referenced the method of flipping the classroom, where students are tasked with reading up on background materials prior to a lecture. Then students participate in problem-based learning or peer instruction instead of the professor leading the lecture.

“It’s one thing to come to class and watch a professor solve a problem on the board. You can take detailed notes and as you follow along with a problem, you think you know the material. But when it comes time to apply the concepts or take the exam, you realize you don’t know it [laughs]. We say to the students, sometimes the best way to learn is by teaching others.”

For Loya, it is rewarding to give back to the program that she went through just a few years ago. A biomedical engineering major and electrical engineering minor, she knows the value that engineering at Union can have and the multiple avenues it can open up after graduation.

“It’s so interdisciplinary. There are so many different areas that you can explore. The program builds a foundation of both breadth and depth of knowledge that consists of a little bit of everything. You study electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering; and then you get the life sciences like biology and chemistry so that you can apply it to the body. That is what our major tries to provide and that is why my experience at Union prepared me for whatever came next.”

Part of the fun of her field is that it allows Loya to combine three of her favorite things: engineering, basketball, and giving back to others.

“I’ve realized a common theme throughout various stages of my life is that I keep trying to connect all of my passions, whether it’s through outreach, in the classroom, or on the basketball court.”

That type of others-first attitude has been in place since she first stepped on campus. As the oldest of four siblings, Loya is always seeking out ways to not only mentor and teach, but also pay it forward. Just as she did as an undergraduate, she has continued to take student-athletes at Union – both from women’s basketball and other teams – under her wing.

“We always talk about modelling the way, being the example,” said Burt. “She certainly was that both on the court and in the classroom. But what takes people like Amy to that next level was how she got others on the team to go to the library with her, to do community service work with her, to do extra shooting with her. She was so involved in programs on campus and she kind of commandeered her teammates to come help with it.”

“Amy was able to be a leader on the team by the example she set both on and off the court,” added McDonald. “Amy was relentless in how she attacked her academics, the same way she battled on the basketball court. She has always held herself to a standard of excellence and in doing that, she inspired her teammates, especially the younger ones, to do the same.”

One of the things she helped develop at 4th Family was a shooting app that produces a colorimetric graph of a high percentage shot area versus a low percentage shot area, like a heat map of Steph Curry’s shooting efficiency over a season that you would see on ESPN. The app was included as part of the curriculum at 4th Family’s sport clinics.

“Our initiative showed players and coaches how to use the scientific method to ask questions and develop basketball drills with the app to design experiments, while simultaneously teaching students about percentages and efficiency. We wanted to see if we could shift the participants’ perception of how math, science and engineering could apply to sports. We wanted to introduce them to future career options related to basketball, outside of becoming the next LeBron James.”

As a former student-athlete, sports – and basketball in particular – was a natural pathway to engineering for Loya. She hopes that similar connections to sport can increase the number of students who use sports to access STEM careers.

“We use our basketball clinics as a model that hopefully we can apply to other sports,” Loya explained. “We build sport science equipment with the students and it’s up to them to figure out what questions they can answer using the tools that they build. The kids become the experts because they are the ones doing the thinking that will help them improve.”

Eventually, her work with 4th Family gained a much larger – and more influential – audience. Her team published a paper about their work and submitted it to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, one of the world’s leading forums in discussing the role of analytics in the global sports industry. Despite being an outlier in terms of subject matter, the paper won first place.

“We were shocked because most of the research papers are aimed at developing new metrics and techniques in sports analytics. Ours was an outreach paper that used rudimentary analytics to introduce analytics to kids. We did this to show other biomedical engineering researchers and professional sports organizations that their interests and their research can reach so many students via sports.”

Part of their prize was taking a trip to Las Vegas for the NBA Summer League in 2017, where the team presented their research to the NBA Coaches Association. From there, the group has been asked to return annually and develop a sports and STEM outreach camp for the Summer League. The group partners with the Jr. NBA and the Tomorrow’s Stars Foundation to reward high achieving, under-resourced youth with a trip to the NBA Summer League and participation in the camp.