As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by difficult problems. Being the child of two doctors, the earliest problems I heard about were medical complications. I would hear from my dad about a cancer patient who didn’t respond to chemotherapy even though the treatment worked fine in all of his other patients. I would hear from my mom about patients who were paralyzed in all four limbs, such that they were not even able to use wheelchairs to move around. I remember during my early teenage years, during long commutes, asking my parents to describe problems that they had faced in the clinic, while I tried to think of solutions.

As an undergraduate student at MIT, I was excited to find researchers using analytical techniques to solve the very same problems that had intrigued me years earlier. I met researchers using machine learning methods to tailor chemotherapy to a patient's specific genome. When one of my professors, Dr. Joel Voldman, mentioned that his lab was building brain-machine interfaces to bypass the spinal cord and allow paralyzed people to control their limbs once more, I applied for a research position immediately. As the primary electrical engineer on the project, I designed and tested advanced neural probes that could be implanted in the brain for extended periods of time. My work for the next two years included the design of sensors and electrodes on flexible substrates and in vitro testing to confirm the behavior that we desired.

I then moved from hardware to software, working with Dr. George Verghese and Dr. Thomas Heldt for two years devising model-based algorithms to help doctors diagnose respiratory diseases using capnography, a non-invasive and effort-independent measurement. Based on extensive modeling, simulation, and machine-learning, I was able to demonstrate that my algorithms, on certain classes of patients, could perform just as well as the expensive and difficult pulmonary function tests used in practice. I presented this research at the 2015 EMBC conference in Milan to great acclaim, yet what excites me most about this work is that we are working with a clinician from Boston Children’s Hospital who is sharing my results with other doctors, allowing my work to have impact on clinical practice.

Along the way, I also looked for opportunities to collaborate with other students to solve medical problems. In 2014, as part of a hackathon, our interdisciplinary team built a low-cost airflow sensor for global health settings and, after winning first place in the hackathon, secured funding from MIT to travel to and conduct a needs analysis in rural India. Such experiences ingrained in me the importance of effective communication and teamwork, as these large-scale projects required multiple skillsets that only an interdisciplinary team could provide.

My own experience at MIT also helped me realize how difficult it is to pursue biomedical engineering at MIT, which does not have a major devoted to the field. I joined MIT’s Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) and, as president of the society, focused on ways to revive the organization, which had lost a meaningful mission. Based on my own experience of having trouble finding opportunities for biomedical engineering (BME) students at MIT, our group hosted info sessions for undergraduates to ask panels of senior students  about their journey as BME students, and created an “underground guide” to help students choose classes, research labs, and internships. Realizing the importance of reaching out beyond MIT, we also initiated collaborations with BMES organizations at universities, and organized a trip to the annual BMES conference. The club has now attracted a much larger following, and continues the activities that I started years ago. I have also had the ability to present my own research to students in the club, and I have found that my research carries new meaning when I am able to use it inspire others.

Last year, something gave me a new sense of urgency and determination. My XXX was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with XXX. I immediately left Boston and flew down to XXX, where I learned with dread that doctors knew of no cure for XXX, and - what seemed to me even more shocking - had no knowledge of the cause of the disease.

As I spent that weekend in my XXX’s ward, I learned as much as I could about ulcerative colitis. The more I read, the more I surprised I became with how much of medicine was still a mystery. From Eric Topol’s “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,” I learned about the limitations of practicing “medicine by the yard,” or basing therapies for individual patients on aggregate clinical results. I further realized that not enough was being done to measure biomedical signals and diagnose and treat patients before they became sick.

When I returned to MIT for my Master’s degree, I began working with Dr. Giovanni Traverso, a research fellow at MIT who is also a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. My work is to design ingestible sensors that are embedded in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract for long periods of time in the hopes of sensing patterns in environmental factors that are connected to different diseases of the GI tract. I have designed the electronics for our sensor, and have begun the process of testing the device in vitro and in vivo.

By doing research at MIT for the last 4 years, I have realized the tremendous importance of collaborating with clinicians when doing engineering research for applications in medicine. Many of the graduate students I have worked with are part of the HST MEMP program, and are working with doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and other hospitals in the area. I think this kind of collaboration between electrical engineers and clinician will hold the keys to understanding the causes of disease and development of therapies to treat individuals instead of populations, and that is why I am thrilled to be applying for a PhD position in the HST program. Not only am I excited to continue discovering new diagnostic and therapeutic tools, but also, drawing from my experience leading MIT’s BMES, I am also looking forward to sharing my work in a way that inspires others to become excited about biomedical and electrical engineering and know the way to turn that excitement into discovery.