In what has become an annual tradition, we had an OML pumpkin carving party on the oval once again. Due to scheduling conflicts we didn’t have quite as many people as we usually do, but those who did join had a great time and created some masterpieces!
A quick post to give a shoutout to Stephanie, who has been at NC State for 15 years! She is an integral part to our lab’s success and we don’t know what we’d do without her. To celebrate we had cupcakes outside on a beautiful day and got Steph a sparkly purple hat – the next best thing to a bejeweled crown.
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!
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. We’re so proud of all of them.
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!
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!
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.
Showing off their designs:
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:
Group Photo:
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:
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.
Here’s the rest of the cohort (original on the AGEP-NC Webpage):
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/
