December 3, 2024
I have an undergraduate background in Economics, Math, and premed. From here, I got my MS in BME from Duke, worked in industry for a little while mostly testing algorithm performance. I decided to come back to Duke to get my PhD because I wanted to take on more technical leadership roles in computational work. I wanted to be the one to develop algorithms
Q: What motivates you?
A: The impact of the work. I love computational work, and I am excited that it can be helpful in analyzing data and developing models for many areas like medical research and environmental monitoring. I'm excited to take what I am learning through my current experiences and apply them to coming up with solutions for these types of problems
Q: Can you summarize your research area?
A: I'm detecting and measuring tiny things basically. My research is focused on measuring cell behaviors as a function of properties of the microenvironment in tissue engineering scaffolds. Though this is a biological, materials science research question, extracting the data requires a lot of image processing and computer vision methods.
Q: What's your favorite part of research?
A: There are actually a lot of patterns in biology that the naked eye can't pick up on. It's exciting to see it be done with computation. Aside from that, I started collaborating with other PhD students and PIs this year. I highly recommend doing this. Not only is it incredibly fun to work with others, but it gives you the power to solve more problems more quickly. We can split the work up based on expertise and come up with a more wholistic approach to solving the problem. I am so glad I decided to start collaborating with others through the aiM program and beyond.