From Ana’s Nomination:
Right from the start, Ana showed a strong interest in the
interdisciplinary nature of a biomedical engineering design project that lies
at the intersection of electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. After
several discussions and conversations with Professor Pacifici and Professor
Franck, Ana began the groundwork on her project to measure hydrogel and tissue
scaffold deformations under spatially controlled applied electromechanical
forces. Her project builds upon concepts from chemistry, cell biology, materials
science and mechanical and electrical engineering, and is a genuinely innovative
and interdisciplinary project.
The design of her senior capstone project features an in-vitro
test bench or assay to apply spatially controlled forces to tissue mimicking
hydrogels and scaffolds in all three dimensions. The mechanical properties of
tissues and synthetic implant materials are extremely important in achieving
proper physiological homeostasis in the human body, which requires experimental
techniques to quantify them. The last decade has urged the scientific community
to develop in-vitro methodologies that are able to measure quantities of
interest in three dimensions thus representing a more realistic in-vivo or body-like
setting. While three-dimensional measurements are intrinsically more challenging
that traditional two-dimensional data collection and experimental design, Ana
has accepted the challenge to do just that.
She is in the process of developing an electromagnetic field
assay to generate physical forces inside tissue-mimicking hydrogels. By
applying a magnetic field similar to that in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
scanner to micron-sized magnetic particles inside a hydrogel, Ana will
determine the three-dimensional displacements that these magnetic particles
undergo. Utilizing her Newtonian mechanics and electrostatics and magnetism
principles, Ana will be able to determine the mechanical properties of these
gels and tissues at micron and nanometer length scales in all three dimensions.
Thus, through her capstone project she will be able to deliver a powerful
characterization tool to the biomedical and engineering communities to aid in
the development of improved implant materials and artificial tissues.
From Karine’s Nomination:
Karine is a talented mechanical engineer interested in a
variety of subjects with sound understanding of mathematics, physics and
engineering. She came up with her own research program about six months ago,
and has since not only demonstrated successful technical expertise in executing
the research but also has managed to disseminate the results.
Karine’s project is about bio-inspired desalination. The largest source of fresh water on this planet comes from natural desalination of ocean water through rain. Artificial desalination using various technologies
also provides a small portion of the fresh water humans use. Karine asked
herself, how do we create rain in a small container in our living room, and came
up with quite interesting ideas. Her first idea was the observation that plants
are very efficient at evaporating water from the soil. Is it possible to design
an engineering process that mimics plants in transporting and evaporating
water? Karine's second idea for condensing the water was to mimic Namibian
fog-harvesting beetles. Tiny bumps on the backs of these fog-harvesting beetles
have a special surface chemistry that facilitates the condensation of water,
and moreover forms structures that channels the condensed water straight to the
beetle’s mouth. Karine brought both these ideas to her advisor as a proposal
for her 2011 summer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA). Karine’s
proposal secured the summer UTRA and she demonstrated her technical expertise
during the summer research. She carried out a computational simulation of a toy
mathematical model to demonstrate the principle reason behind the efficient evaporation
through plant leaves. This result has increased her confidence in the research
program and she has now designed a set of microfluidic devices to test her
result experimentally. These devices mimic the properties of the leaves,
especially the distribution of stomata on a leaf surface, to assist
evaporation.
Karine actively participates in the scientific community and
disseminates her research discoveries. She presented a poster on this in the
Undergraduate Summer Research Symposium at Brown, and is scheduled to present a
poster at the New England Workshop on Mechanics of Materials and Structures.
She acquired a partial travel grant from the American Physical Society to
present a poster of her results at the annual meeting of the Division of Fluid
Dynamics in Baltimore in November. The prize funds for the project will be used
to experimentally test the principle Karine has discovered. The experiment
essentially consists of subjecting the microfluidic devices Karine designed to
air flow in a small wind tunnel and measuring the evaporation rate through
each. Her prediction is that the evaporation rate will increase with the air
flow but reach a state of marginal returns as the air speed is increased beyond
a critical value, and this critical value is different for each of Karine’s
devices. The results from these experiments can be directly compared with
evaporation from leaves to check if the leaves are optimized for particular
wind speeds.
