Yihan, who is co-advised by Jacque and Dr. Martin King in the College of Textiles, defended her dissertation yesterday and received an unconditional pass. We’re so proud!
Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium
We had a whopping 6 undergrads present at the 2022 Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium! Or maybe only five, technically, since Christina is technically part of Kate Saul’s Lab. You can read about their research in the abstract book put out by the Office of Undergraduate Research, found here (this link will download a pdf). You can also find it here then scroll down to ABSTRACT BOOK. We’re so proud of all of them.
Emma (abstract pg 104)
Lani (Abstract pg 113)
Steven (Abstract pg 112)
Rose (Abstract pg. 103)
Carter (Abstract pg. 102)
Christina (Abstract pg. 107)
Graduation – Spring 2022
OML is very proud to have had two of our amazing undergrads graduate last weekend.
Vince will be heading to Madison, Wisconsin, to be a technical solutions engineer at Epic Systems. He will be be working with clients to implement changes to improve Epic’s healthcare database software.
Jennifer is will be working as a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) in the Raleigh area during her gap year and applying to medical schools for fall 2023. This summer she’s going to stick around the lab to help us out, so we’re relieved to not be losing her quite yet!
Spring OUR Symposium
We had two undergrads present posters at the Spring OUR (Office of Undergraduate Research) symposium. Kathryn presented her research with Sandra to optimize the Bone-On-Chip device, and Deeqa talked about her Finite Element Modeling work with Jason. Great job ladies!
National Biomechanics Day 2022
Last Friday we celebrated National Biomechanics Day at NC State. We missed the official National Biomechanics Day (April 6) due to travel and other obligations, so we opted to hold our event a few weeks later. But we’re pretty sure the students didn’t mind.
This year we decided to re-envision the event from what we’ve done in the past. In previous years, we’ve had an expo-style event with labs leading short demos or activities related to their research. These events had 100-200 attendees. But this year we wanted to foster more meaningful connections with attendees, so we pared it down to 35 students and guided them through an engineering challenge. We chose the one from Teach Engineering made by Biomedical Engineers at UVA (find it here). It’s the year 2050 and Bill was hit by a car. A section of his bone, muscle, and skin were damaged beyond repair and need to be totally replaced by 3D bioprinting. The students have been hired as biomedical engineers to help print bone, muscle, and skin grafts for Bill.
We divided the students into groups of four, where they first brainstormed the problem, reading over information on their tissue type and thinking about how they could print it. They then broke into groups, assembled their bioprinters, and then got to making solutions.
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The amazing Plaster of Paris wranglers. By the end of the day, none of their clothing had been spared from the wrath of Plaster of Paris powder!
At the end of the day, the groups all shared out their designs. We also had a teacher help us award a “superlative” to each group. The winners included:
- Perseverance in the face of glue that wouldn’t stick
- Most laughing
- Runniest plaster masterpiece
- Most creative
- Muscle masterpiece
- Fantastic femur
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Group Photo:
Sandra Officially Awarded an F31 Fellowship
Sandra was recently awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship from the NIH to help her finish up her graduate work. Though she found out that she scored very high back in the fall, she did not officially receive confirmation of funding until today– the number of fellowships awarded each year depends on budget, so a high score is good but receiving an official Notice of Award is better.
. We’re all so excited for her!
You can go congratulate her on Twitter yourself:
Good news today! I got the NoA for my F31 application! Very happy and relieved that hard work does indeed payoff!! 🎉🎊 #phdwin @UNCNCSUBME @JacqueColeLab
— Sandra Stangeland-Molo (@Zandyrz) March 10, 2022
Jacque Named an AGEP Fellow
Earlier this year, Jacque was named to the third cohort of AGEP-NC fellows. Per the website:
AGEP-NC (North Carolina Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate) Fellows serve two-year terms learning about cross-cultural mentoring, promoting diversity in doctoral programs, and facilitating departmental dialog.
- Fellows develop initiatives to raise awareness, promote buy-in and build cross-cultural and mentoring skills among the faculty in their department;
- Engage the faculty in designing approaches to address obstacles for students and the needs of faculty for creating pathways for success for diverse dissertation students;
- Coordinate a faculty process of developing a departmental plan for doctoral student diversity and inclusion.
Here’s the rest of the cohort (original on the AGEP-NC Webpage):
Jennifer Wins a Departmental Research Award
Jennifer, one of our long-time undergrads, was recently awarded the BME Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for her outstanding work done in OML. We’re so proud of her, but also so sad that we’re going to lose her in the spring as she graduates and moves on to bigger and better things.
Per the announcement, “The goals of these awards include: giving students formal recognition to support their next steps (graduate school applications, job applications, etc.); and promoting a culture of BME undergraduate students thriving within research laboratories across both campuses. [These] students have gone “above and beyond” to make significant contributions to their research labs.”
Check out the announcement here: https://bme.unc.edu/bme-excellence-in-undergraduate-research-awardees/