Entrepreneurial

Experience 1: Medesign

Dates: August 2023 - Present, 2 hours a week

From the beginning of sophomore year, I have been a part of the student group medesign where we have been researching an infra-red imaging device for early diagnosis of stroke (hemorrhagic or ischemic) in order to treat people earlier.  Since then, I have become the project leader. The current method of determiing cause of stroke is a CT scan, which takes a long time. This means that patients are treated later, and increases the chances of irreversible damage being done from stroke. We aim to make an IR device that can diagnose the cause of stroke much faster by sensing is there is a large pool of blood in the brain. Also, we aim to make this device portable so EMTs can diagnose and treat stroke in the field.  We have since developed a circuit that transmits and receives an IR signal and can sense the difference between brain (resin) or blood (water). We have also developed a rough model of the brain, with just blood and brain matter, for initial testing, and are now working on developing it to be more accurate to include the skull, skin and differentiate been grey and pink brain matter. I have been learning how to lead a group of people with different skill sets, as well as figuring out the next steps for the project with little guidance based on the results of the experiments we run. 

Experience 2:  2 semester design course

Supervisor: Mark Palmeri

During my senior year, I plan to take 2 semesters of a medical device design elective, where we design, prototype and develop a medical device through the year. Through this I hope to learn more about a different type of medical device and develop my skills designing products in this field in order to engineer better medicines.