I stumbled upon the field of medical simulation by chance. At the beginning of my junior year at the University of Washington, I had just finished a summer internship at Cabot Microelectronics in Aurora, IL. There, I worked towards developing methods to analyze oxidation of tungsten thin films. For this, I worked partially on-site with a focus on Raman spectroscopy and on atomic force microscopy in a cleanroom. I also spent some time at the electron microscopy labs at Northwestern University. There, I met an amazingly diverse group of researchers, including chemists from the Art Institute of Chicago who were using the same SEM as me to analyze the lead content in a chip of paint from a Georgia O’Keefe painting. At the time, that struck me as the coolest job in the world.
My internship at Cabot Microelectronics was my first real research experience and I truly enjoyed every single day of it. However, this experience reinforced my initial intuition that a career in traditional electronics manufacturing was not going to meet my personal desire to contribute to a field with a clear positive societal impact. With this in mind, I joined Prof. Devin MacKenzie’s scalable printed electronic and energy devices (SPEED) group based out of the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds. While still in the realm of electronics development, the SPEED group thinks creatively about processing in order to minimize manufacturing waste and more efficiently store generated energy. Most students in the group work on solar cell development, but I was specifically drawn to a project focusing on the development of printed, flexible, uniaxial strain sensors. I’ve been working on this project for over a year now, and have contributed to the formulation of a new, printable organogel sensor. I have been independently printing the sensor gels on a silicone substrate with the nScrypt industrial microdispenser and I characterized rheological, compositional, and electromechanical properties of the new gels. I co-authored one paper, and another paper on the new organogel is in progress and will be submitted to ACS Biomaterials very soon. I was finding success and value in my sensor research, but I had a lingering interest in conservation science that was sparked by the Art Institute researchers I met at Northwestern University. To explore this interest, I applied to an unpaid summer internship at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Unexpectedly, I got the internship. I was immediately determined to make it work financially so I applied for a student laboratory technician position at the Center for Research in Education and Simulation Technologies (CREST) at the UW Medical Center. I had been working with CREST in collaboration with my sensor research as they were interested in embedding the sensors in their training manikin. I got the job and began saving up for the internship in DC. It was daunting to prepare to live in one of the most expensive cities in America while turning down high paying internship offers at electronics companies near to home in Seattle and Portland. However, this challenge was more than worth it to be able to learn about a whole new field of study while contributing to such a valuable public institution. At the Library of Congress, I learned about the endless list of scientific wonders and dilemmas hiding in America’s collection of books, documents, and objects. I was especially intrigued by the mysterious “sticky shed” plaguing some of the Library’s magnetic audio tape collection. In eight short weeks, I planned and executed a research project analyzing these problematic tapes. I independently used an environmental scanning electron microscope and a portable atomic force microscope to classify differences in a selection of tapes based on composition and degradation mechanisms identified through microscopy and playback analysis. I was able to use my technical training to inform a more effective conservation technique. This was an incredibly informative and empowering experience. However, in the end I was surprised by how eager I was to get back to my work at CREST. Although my initial plan was to build a path towards conservation science, I ended up discovering a real passion for work in the medical realm. Part of my job at CREST is to measure biomechanical properties of donated human organs. From these numbers, we develop simulated organs that match real tissue properties. I’m currently working on an ultrasound-able liver model with embedded portal vein and bile duct for simulation of percutaneous transhepatic biliary drainage. Related to this project, I recently submitted a first author abstract to the Americas Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association analyzing the suture pullout force of the pancreatic duct. I’m also working on embedding the organogel sensors in silicone tissue blocks that mimic a variety of dermatological procedures. This could be a huge first step in the advancement of suture training. In a field where so much of the feedback is based on subjective observation, the ability to embed objective feedback mechanisms will be incredibly important in minimizing room for preventable and deadly mistakes. |