I worked as the on-site mechanical engineer for the Delgado-Vela Lab at Duke University. Here, I undertook several mechanical engineering projects. Mainly, I designed a tank and control system for a membrane aerated biofilm reactor (MABR) that featured liquid and gas mass flow control, active pH adjustment, and continuous monitoring and analysis via a comprehensive LabVIEW program. I also worked to integrate existing pH control systems with remote cloud access.

I worked to update, calibrate, and create new lab equipment for the Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering departments of Duke University. I created validation protocols and technical documentation for the calibration of newly fixed and redesigned lab equipment. I updated the Control Systems lab protocols to enhance student learning and transitioned them to LaTex. I also physically fixed and created experimental rigs using soldering, manual machining, LabVIEW, and MATLAB.

Pratt Fellows is a 3-semester research program alongside a full summer research internship that allows students to dive in and accomplish an intensive research project. I am working in my home lab of the Hoffman Laboratory working on investigating the mechanical stability of fluorescent proteins (FP's) commonly used in molecular tension sensors (MTS). By understanding their relative stabilities, I hope to create a library of FP's that can be used by future researchers to tune MTS stability and create new sensors that mimic their target protein stability and create a more relevant picture of force-protein interaction.

I investigated the molecular mechanisms of mechanobiology via the design, analysis, and implementation of Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) Tension sensors. My main work was in analyzing the effect of FP switching under molecular tension on FP activity and FRET sensor output via fluorescent microscopy using both live and fixed samples. I also worked on designing new biosensors with optimized fluorescent tags or enhanced mechanical stability and creating new analysis programs and mathematical models for analyzing FRET data.

I was selected along with 21 scholars from across the world to participate in an 9-week research program, culminating in a poster session to display the results of our individual projects at Kyoto University. My project, titled "Elucidation of the Effect of Mechanical Force on Epithelial Cell Actin Dynamics", focused on characterizing the mechanodynamics of the actin cytoskeleton in epithelial cells and was carried out in the Lab of Single-Molecule Cell Biology under Professor Naoki Watanabe.

BSURF is an intensive 8-week research fellowship to introduce first-year students to biological research. I worked in the Cell and Molecular Mechanobiology Lab creating a novel suite of vinculin biosensors to study vinculin dynamics in collective cell migration. In addition, my cohort and I were able to go through professional development seminars and lectures from invited faculty to help us start our careers as young research scientists.