I have always wanted to help people with their medical needs and biomedical engineering supplied the opportunity to do so. I decided to study biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University for my undergraduate degree. Early on, after my first two years, I was still unsure which concentration I would choose to pursue. Most of my exposure up until that point was to medical devices and instrumentation. It wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped, so I branched out and started to look for research positions. At the start of the second semester in my junior year, I found myself working at Vanderbilt University Medical Center doing research in a geriatric medicine lab with Dr. Laura Dugan. The lab focused on neurodegenerative diseases and potential treatments to impede or inhibit their progression.

When I first started in the lab, I was responsible for completing routine tasks such as washing dishware, checking inventory, and keeping a clean and organized space for others to carry out experiments. After only 4 months of working in the lab, I was given the chance to conduct my own research experiment over the summer. I had been granted the only Summer Enrichment Research Program in Education and Neuroscience Training (SERPENT) stipend which allowed me to participate in the Vanderbilt Summer Science Academy (VSSA). Over the summer, I worked on an experiment and created a poster for the VSSA poster symposium. The goal of the project was to determine the time-course of the protein expression of parvalbumin (PV) and tdTomato red fluorescent protein in PV-positive inhibitory interneurons. To assess the expression of these proteins, I cultured cells from the cortices of embryonic mice in glass-bottom dishes. These dishes were then fixed and fluorescently stained for PV over a 15-day time period and subsequently imaged with confocal microscopy. By understanding the time-course of the expression of these two proteins, the Dugan Lab could gain a better understanding of the role of the proteins and the neurons that produce them. My time in the Dugan lab led me to decide that I wanted to do research and development in industry, but I still didn’t know exactly what area of biomedical engineering I wanted to focus on.

In my senior year at Vanderbilt, I took two courses that helped me in determining the answer to this problem. I took a course on drug delivery methods and another on drug development and biotechnology, and was easily able to say that I wanted to do research in the field of pharma and biotech. While I was very interested in the subject area, I didn’t have much experience because the undergraduate curriculum didn’t explore it much. This is what led me to seek a higher education and obtain a masters degree. In my time here at Stony Brook, I expect to gather more knowledge and become more familiar with laboratory techniques that together, will provide me with the necessary skill set to thrive in my future endeavors in the pharma and biotech realm.

 

Education

Stony Brook University – Stony Brook, NY
Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering – expected graduation May 2020

Vanderbilt University – Nashville, TN
Bachelor of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering – May 2018