Amit Shenoy Email & Phone Number

Boston, Ma, Us

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

The COMBINE Lab is on a mission to aid in the engineering of a novel pulmonary surfactant. We contribute to this mission purely computationally, with the lab being a circle of computers. We communicate via Teams, an email list, and a Whatsapp group -- Whatsapp being the most accessible to our blind lab advisor, Dr. Minkara, who we call Mona. At the beginning of each semester, each COMBINE Lab member sets a rough weekly Lab schedule, as Mona is a big believer in coming into the office and collaborating with labmates (and I now agree). We let our labmates know that we're in or out of office with a Whatsapp message into the group (e.g. "Amit in" "Amit out"). Outside of our individual lab schedules, the whole COMBINE Group meets on Tuesday evenings for roughly an hour, during which two group members present a journal/literature review and a research update. All presentations have images alt-texted, and all data is printed using a heat printer so that Mona can feel the data. Joining the COMBINE group has been one of my best decisions at Northeastern and I continue to happily dedicate 15+ hours every week.Joining the COMBINE Lab was an exciting time as well. Mona is also a big believer in initiative, and so there is no external lab newsletter -- each and every student in Mona's lab reached out to her first. The interview process also took a considerable but worthy time investment -- to read 3 of COMBINE Lab's published papers and prepare a 15 minute presentation on each. You can imagine my shock when I walked into the room and Mona said, "You have the presentations? Great. Now I want you to tell me what you know without looking at them." Since then, it's always been a new lesson with Mona, and I'm grateful to have such an experienced and thoughtful person as a mentor.Presently, my project title is "Extracting the Binding Affinities between Mannose-Binding-Lectin and Various Viral Glycans via Molecular Docking". I'm looking forward to making some discoveries of my own!

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

My belief in giving back once again fueled my search for tutoring opportunites in Shrewsbury. My expertise in the school system and the curricula after having done my middle and high school education there myself gave me the oppourtunity to help students with topics with which I myself had once struggled with. What started as a volunteering hobby became something I wanted to devote more of my time to -- and I was lucky to meet some great kids through high school connections. I'm always happy to schedule a one on one with a kid if you need, and am open to discussing a long term tutoring schedule as well depending on boht of our availabilities. My experience as a tutor once again put me on the mentor side of education and enabled me to get better at finding the balance between fun and learning faster at each meeting. I look forward to continuing this passion throughout my career as a college student and perhaps even beyond (though I might seem more like a teacher than a tutor at 30).

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Another opportunity to give back, I was happy to brush up on my trigonometry and my programming to support high schoolers from Boston Public Schools as they prepared for their senior year! BTC (Bridge to Calculus) serves to support high schoolers before their senior year, paying them to learn, so they don't have to choose between earning and education. Northeastern University offers its campus as a location for instructors, mentors, and students to come and facilitate a healthy learning environment together. As a mentor, I would spend my weekday mornings (7:30 - 9:30) and my Fridays (7:30 - 1:00). I had the pleasure of working with two other mentors who I can now call friends, and we worked together to support our students. We were also happy to find our classroom instructor had a passion for teaching, and would always keep us in the loop with next steps and which students to give special attention. Speaking of which, the students were fantastic to work with. There were certainly attention and attendance issues, but they were resolved as we started giving those students the attention they needed. I was reminded of the importance of offering help even when it isn't asked for. Our tasks were primarily to explain topics to students, answer questions, grade and provide feedback on assignments, and to distribute other tasks among each other (attendance, event planning, answer key verification). On the robotics side of things, I facilitated lessons regarding the construction/programming/presentation of robot arm & troubleshot issues. I recommend becoming a BTC mentor if you happen to be a student in the area over the summer -- maybe you can even take summer classes while you do it! It was certainly interesting switching between mentor and student on the daily on campus.

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

An arcade in a children's museum created by bunch of college students. Granted, engineering students. Granted, honors students. Still, a feat to be carried out by our engineering professor. This experience was the culmination of the two engineering projects that we had completed in class prior, and the most involved of the 3. Right away, we started off by creating a team charter, a document tracking our team's general meeting times, modes of communication, and rules (like penalties for coming late to a meeting). We then did a team assessment together, rooting out our individual and collective strengths and weaknesses. This step was pivotal to assigning roles to one another for the remainder of the project. Granted, these roles were dynamic and would end up merging and switching every now and then, the initial role was the majority of the responsiblity that we would take on -- so it was critical to play to our strengths and weaknesses.Next, we brainstormed an idea for our project game type. We used the "quantity over quality" method -- where each of us wrote down as many ideas as we could for potential projects, irrespective of feasibility or team approval. The purpose of this technique is to generate as many authentic ideas as possible, with one "bad" or "ridiculous" idea leading to the generation of an idea that may actually be realistic. Ironically, this turned out to be the "meat" of the project. Once our team had a solid consensus on what we wanted to do, we ran only into technical issues -- which engineers are best at figuring out. They were the following:- The frame design we had CADed as a 3D template get to be redesigned so it could be better supported. - This also meant that we got to re-saw the wooden frame to fit the design- The programming languages we knew were not sufficient to create an animation, so we learnt a new one (Processing)!- The game would take 30 seconds to boot up at the exhibit, so we improvised a script to stall!Memories!!!

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

The second project in the three project saga offered to us in the Cornerstone of Engineering course, we were tasked with creating a board game with embedded electronics to entertain a selected client. In our case, we got to design a game for a former Cornerstone student who hailed from New Jersey and had a fondness for Jersey Devil lore. We went about designing our game by first deciding on a theme for the game based on our client's interests. It was pretty clear to the team that we wanted to do something with the Jersey Devil lore.Next, we went about deciding the mechanics of our game with a Decision Matrix. Here's how it works: Take every parameter of your functional solution -- in this case, characteristics of a board game were its material, its objective, its portability, its electronics, etc. The purpose of this decision matrix (also known as a morphological chart) is to inspire team members to come to a census and also to consider combinations that they may not have initially. After this stage, we were sure that we wanted to make a foldable board game that you could fit in your bag, using LEDs and motion sensors, and a buzzer.The rest of the project consisted of the team budgeting wisely, travelling to and browsing online to purchase supplies, and spending time in our First Year Engineering Center to put it all together.The biggest challenges were certainly wiring compatibility with Arduino, and optimizing the code to run all elements in parallel. It was also a challenge to design the board such that it could fold up properly without a weight imbalance. We ended up having to sacrifice some portability due to realistic box size constraints due to the electronics, but were able to preserve most of it.

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Cornerstone of Engineering is a course unique to Northeastern University, a two-semester class designed to expose students to all facets of engineering, including but not limited to: mechanical work, electrical work, programming, presentation, intellectual property, and ethics. Dr. Hertz, our enthusiastic professor for the Honors section of this course structured for us a 3 part saga of projects consisting of a Yard Game (to accommodate disabled people), Electronic Board Game (to serve a particular client), and Boston Children's Museum Arcade Game (to entertain children for 2 hours). This is the first of those three.Our team was on a mission to create a yard game that promoted physical activity in a community of disabled people of our choice. Given the freedom to research and choose a community that we would like to serve, our team crafted a memo defending our choice of the lower-body physically disabled community, explaining that it is often difficult to replay yard games because players would need to pick up parts off of the ground and set up the game all over again. Our team, a group of three, functioned via SMS messaging and meetings in our freshman honors dorm, East Village. Since all of our team members lived in the same building, it made it convenient to get together and make progress. Following the structure of deliverables and the engineering process Dr. Hertz provided us, we worked to create our final product. The steps were as follows: Find the problem, describe the problem, describe the characteristics of a functional solution, build a particular solution, test the solution, and evaluate the results.Over the course of this project, we made three deliverables – a rough cardboard prototype (design, not to scale), a functional cardboard prototype (to scale), and a final product (which we created using PVC pipes). Leveraging the resources at FYELIC, our engineering center, we assembled and formally presented our design in front of the class!

Westborough, Massachusetts, United States

I believe in giving back, and was thrilled when I heard that there were open positions at Code Wiz Westborough. Within two months of training via the coding learning app Codio, I was given the privilege of mentoring kids 1 on 1. I enjoyed getting to know the kids and seeing them grow in their coding abilities, while having fun along the way! This experience being my third or fourth experience in a serious mentorship role, it was nice to see my prior experience pay off -- the role was very comfortable this time around.

Worcester, Massachusetts, United States

Just amazing!!! Talk finally became action and I felt like a real scientist as my Lab technician walked my project partner and I through lab safety. Overtime, hand-washing, glove-swapping, lab coats, and safety glasses became second nature and I got first-hand experience streaking bacteria onto the agar plate batch we designed for our project. The purpose of the project was to make sanitation easy -- and we went about it by taking the science to the people who needed it -- Africans without access to modern medicine. Given that stills, simple machines that condense gas compounds into liquid, are a common occurance in Africa, and that herbs commonly deemed benefical to immune health in Indian culture were native to the African climate, we decided to determine how effective a still designed at home would be at harvesting essential oils from herbs while preserving their antimicrobial properties. My partner and I were proud to test our hypothesis that still-harvested oils would express a ZOI (zone of inhibition, a method of measuring antimicrobial effectiveness) of 50% that of the typical. After preparing our batches of bacterial cultures (negative control -- no drug, positive control I -- store-bought essential oils, positive control II -- antibiotics, experimental -- still-harvested essential oils), we were disappointed to discover that our still's harvesting effectiveness was far below that rate (below 10% as effective as compared to positive control I, and certainly not comparable to positive control II). Still, (pun intended) my partner and I were proud to present our results at our school science fair, having put together a poster documenting our results, analysis, etc. and also having maintained our lab notebooks since the beginning of our project in September of that year. Very grateful to the Shrewsbury School systems for providing us the opportunity to pursue Research Methods in-school itself, our chemistry teacher was invaluable in guiding our progress.

Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, United States

I was thrilled at the chance to help guide my sister's FIRST Robotics Team to success! FIRST Robotics serves to spark innovation and teamwork in kids early. It encourages these values in 3 ways: A 2 minute robot game in which participants program their robot to complete point-valued missions, a project about a given theme for year (ex. Animal Allies, Trash Trek), and a core values challenge. Having done 3 years of FIRST in both a private and public team, earned a spot in the state competition, and won awards for our robot game, I expected my mentorship to be on the easier side. However, I quickly found that this experience was different from the robotics camp I had mentored for prior, and certainly different from my experience being the mentee. This time, the team had concrete deadlines, a rigorous project and mission schedule, and strong team dynamic that I was foreign to. I struggled to make a connection with the team members individually, and found it difficult to offer something unique to the group that the other mentors weren't already doing. It was also tough to switch between having a personal and professional relationship with my sister in particular. Though my role on the team wasn't as prominent as I would have liked it to be, I learnt by watching how the other mentors effectively rallied the girls to get thinking about their project and programming. I also realized that it didn't matter so much WHAT the task given to the kids was more WHY it was given. Countless creative core value practice tasks were imagined by my fellow mentors, who were also parents of other members on the team. Their recognition of the fact that the girls needed to strengthen their initiative as a team led to them coming up with more exercises that challenged the girls to think critically and delegate tasks to one another. I also learned the importance of prepping before each meeting (especially tech)! I honored these valuable lessons going into my future mentorship experiences.

Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, United States

After 3 years of being an FLL competitor, the roles were swapped and I was given the opportunity to mentor a group students as I once was. I found it difficult to strike a balance between fun and learning at this point in my mentoring career, as I would get easily distracted by the kids' stories, and we would end up having a good laugh everyday. However, I was fortunate to be surrounded by more experienced mentors who knew how to be both easygoing and firm when needed. Being mentored by mentors shed valuable insight into what it means to be a leader, and this experience cemented my love for education.

Education record

Activities and Societies: Student Government Association (Senator for the Honors Program), Student Services Committee, Sustainability.

High School Diploma

Activities and Societies: Student Council (Event Chair, Received Breast Cancer Event Award), Speech and Debate (Extemporaneous Speaking.