Biomedical Engineering Personal Statement

As a child, I remember learning about the “Renaissance Men” of history; people like Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin, who were scientists, artists, engineers, and so much more. I knew very early on that I wanted to be like these historical figures, as a Renaissance Woman.

The sheer novelty of technology is what first drew me to biomedical engineering, but it is my love of challenge, need for multidisciplinary work, and desire to help others that have kept me captivated. The further I delve into my field, the more intrigued I become. I have the opportunity to work with technology that is often more reminiscent of science fiction than reality. The potential for these technologies to improve lives has inspired my course of study throughout

Through the NIH Biomedical Engineering Summer Internship Program (BESIP), I worked under Dr. Diane Damiano and Dr. Thomas Bulea at the NIH Clinical Center, Rehabilitation Medicine Department in Bethesda, Maryland. The lab has developed an exoskeleton for knee extension assistance in children with cerebral palsy. To contribute to this project, I worked with electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) data to determine the physiological responses to walking with the exoskeleton and the potential for rehabilitative effects. Through this work, we compared walking with and without the exoskeleton to test the hypothesis: that children actively participated in walking with the exoskeleton, indicated by similar muscle and brain activation across conditions. The results suggested that the exoskeleton generally provided favorable increases in knee extensor activity and decreases in flexor muscle activity. The EEG response showed few significant changes, supporting the hypothesis that participants remain actively engaged in the task of walking, instead of offloading the task to the exoskeleton. While time did not permit me to work with the exoskeleton control architecture and design, I am interested in pursuing this topic in the future. Through this experience, I had the opportunity to work in a more clinical setting and worked with medical

My undergraduate curriculum focused on electrical engineering and provided a diverse foundation for technical engineering work, research, and clinical experiences. To practice and expand my capabilities, I have had a number of experiences outside of my academics and my work at the NIH. Since spring 2016, I have worked at the URI Neuro Rehabilitation Lab during the academic year, gaining experience with EEG, brain-computer interfacing, and medical device development. During the spring and summer of 2016, I worked to prepare a brain-computer interfacing demo for my professor’s workshop at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC) 2016, using the OpenVIBE brain-computer interfacing software. In my most recent project, I am investigating the effects of microsaccade eye movements on EEG signals by analyzing the time and frequency domains of EEG signals and corresponding eye movements recorded with an eye tracking camera. This work resulted in a paper at EMBC 2017 in Juju, Korea. During the summer of 2016 and continuing through the following semester, I worked at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, allowing me to experience a large-scale professional engineering environment, work with technical documentation, and gain an introduction to general engineering. This semester and continuing next semester, I am a teaching assistant for the