Jessica Xu

Graduate Student in Biomedical Engineering and Management, Carnegie Mellon University

Jessica Xu aspires to tackle pain points in healthcare by combining her passions in engineering, art, and design. She graduated from MIT in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Medical Devices. During her undergraduate studies, she worked on several collaborative projects including developing a low-cost stair access device for wheelchair users in India, organizing and creating public art to increase student morale, designing a soft robotic implant to help people with weakened diaphragms, and organizing over a dozen healthcare hackathons around the world. The stair access device project, which won several awards including a juried grant at MIT’s IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge, was a key factor in shaping Jessica’s holistic problem-solving skills and approach. To sharpen her abilities to combine engineering expertise and business acumen to effectively bring medical innovations to patients, she is now pursuing dual master’s degrees at Carnegie Mellon in Biomedical Engineering and Engineering & Technology Innovation Management.

Jessica Xu

Interview with Jessica Xu

Jessica painting a mural in the MIT tunnels which she later animated with augmented reality

What advice do you have for high school age girls who want to go into your field of study (or STEAM in general)? What skills were most beneficial to you on your path? What do you wish you had known starting out?

Hands-on experience and engineering theory are both important. Doing rapid prototyping—quickly making physical “sketch models” of your ideas with any scrap materials you have—is not only very fun but has also helped me gain engineering intuition and confidence.

Also, I would advise aspiring engineers to take advantage of unique opportunities and tinker on personal projects to gain skills and find your passion. While I did learn a lot through working in academia and industry, I would say my biggest learning experience thus far has been working independently on the TILT wheelchair attachment. Our team is grateful for the mentorship we received along the way, but through struggling through the bulk of problems on our own and making decisions in the face of uncertainties, we emerged as stronger and more effective problem solvers. I would encourage you to go beyond classes in high school and “get your hands dirty”: check out STEAM-related summer internships, events, or camps put on by your local university clubs (such as Society of Women Engineers), and clubs at your school. If your school doesn’t have a club, maybe you can start something!

What are your other interests and hobbies besides your field of study?

Art is my outlet of expression. My artistic interests are very connected to my engineering studies: both are quite hands-on and require creativity. I love to draw inspiration from the world around me to create something unique, much like I do when solving engineering problems. My favorite mediums right now are pen and ink, watercolor, and colored pencil, and I’m gradually learning photography and videography to document my travels. A few of my favorite works I have made are a collection of illustrations depicting innovations that have been inspired by nature, a collection of animated self-portrait photographs exploring my identity through light and shadow play, and trashion (fashion made of trash). I also enjoy using art to connect with others: at MIT, I created chalk art once a week in a heavily-trafficked part of campus to cheer students up, organized a student mural collection to beautify a new student lounge, and performed traditional and pop dance with MIT’s Asian Dance Team.

Describe the path you took to end up where you are now.

My curiosity and hands-on learning approach led me to be fascinated with STEAM since I was young: I frequently tinkered with chemistry and engineering kits, and I drew and painted to my heart’s content. In high school, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to join a school space club where students design and build palm-sized experiment modules that were sent to the International Space Station. Over the years, I led the electrical engineering team and later became the Program Manager. During the summer before my senior year of high school, I further explored my STEAM interests through conducting organic chemistry research at The Scripps Research Institute. During these experiences in high school, I found that I was most energized by working on projects that have the potential to improve human health. So, when I learned that I could use engineering to directly impact peoples’ lives through medical device development, I decided to major in mechanical engineering at MIT with a concentration in medical devices. Throughout my undergraduate years, I gained a wide variety of experiences including academic research, industrial work, and entrepreneurial/independent projects. These gave me the opportunity to work and lead through a great mixture of challenges that have made me a more effective problem solver and leader.

A passion project I have been working on over the past three years is TILT, a low-cost wheelchair attachment that helps assistants move wheelchair users up and down stairs more easily and safely in developing regions. I am collaborating with two fellow MIT mechanical engineers, Smita Bhattacharjee and Nisal Ovitagala, as well as stakeholders in India. We quickly found that this project doesn’t just need strong engineering skills to create a good solution. More importantly, we need the ability to navigate different cultural and socioeconomic landscapes to address core user needs. By wearing multiple “hats'' in our team of three, I have learned to manage the development of the product and the business in parallel. Our team was awarded several grants, including a grant to make a field visit to India and the $10,000 MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge grant. You can read more about our work in this feature published by MIT India: "TILT: Meeting humanitarian needs through technology."

Lessons from this journey have been widely applicable in my other engineering work, including doing soft robotic implant research at MIT, early-stage design R&D at Medtronic Diabetes, sustaining R&D at Medtronic Neurovascular, and bone implant simulation development at a startup. Applying user-centered design thinking has become second-nature to me after working with countless users to understand, scope, and design for problems ranging from assistive technology to smart fitness technology. Additionally, through moderating expert panel judging of healthcare startup pitches and providing feedback myself on dozens of practice pitches with MIT Hacking Medicine, I have become better at identifying gaps between the problem and the solution, catching business model shortfalls, and communicating complex ideas more clearly. To continue my growth in both engineering and business for health technology, I am pursuing dual master’s degrees at Carnegie Mellon in Biomedical Engineering and Engineering & Technology Innovation Management.

Jessica and co-lead Smita Bhattacharjee with an early prototype of the TILT wheelchair attachment

Why do you think it is important for women in STEAM to support each other? How can young women support and influence their peers?

While there have been many advances for women in STEAM, it’s still commonplace to see a vast majority of men in key positions. Sometimes, it feels so widespread that we almost stop noticing it. One time while I was co-leading a healthcare hackathon with over 1,000 registrants, our partner organization was in charge of inviting keynote speakers for the kick-off event. After updating their headshots on our event website, I was shocked to find a wall of men looking back at me—I was disappointed that in all the frenzy of planning the event, we hadn’t realized that all the speakers were men, despite having an all-women organizing team. I quickly reached out to my network, and luckily an amazing woman in STEAM leadership agreed to be a speaker. After her talk at the kick-off event, I heard from many attendees how her talk was memorable, powerful, and inspiring. Many women attendees especially felt empowered to see a strong woman onstage. This experience reminds me how important it is for women in STEAM to support each other and work together to make sure women’s voices are heard.

Do you have any dreams or goals for yourself or women in STEAM for the future?

So many--I’d love to see more women founding STEAM startups. I’d love to open the “About Us” page on any STEAM company website and see the smiling faces of women in the leadership team. I’d love to go to a hardware store and be taken more seriously. I’d love to see my peers pursue their career goals without feeling like they need to get extra credentialing experiences to be taken seriously.

How do you view art and creativity as a part of STEAM?

When I was in high school, I felt that my passion for art was constantly in tension with my passion for technology. As I sought out new experiences, I began to see through the false dichotomy that art and technology were polar opposites. Art is often about pulling from diverse experiences and functions to synthesize something new, and innovation should be just as interdisciplinary. Especially for multifaceted problems like human health, the elements of ethics, human factors, and artistic thought are just as critical as research and engineering. In my experience, creating art has also made me a more thoughtful and creative engineer.

Art also has parallels with engineering in the way that one can ask questions and process information. Through studying art history, I have learned how we should consume art in the context of its creator, its patron, and the culture at the time in order to critically examine the significance of what or who is represented or not represented. Similarly, in engineering, especially when I am tackling problems for people that I don’t have the lived experience of, I always question: What assumptions do I have? What blind spots do I have? What am I not seeing?

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse