A major barrier to recovery after heart attacks is that cardiac tissue doesn’t heal like tissue in the rest of your body. That's why researchers across many instituations at the CELL-MET Engineering Research Center are working to make tissue patches to replace the injured tissue.An important aspect of making such tissue patches is being able to assess the presence of arrhythmias in the engineered tissues. This can be achieved by characterizing the cardiac excitation waves in the tissue through widefield all-optical mapping of the action potential. All-optical mapping allows for higher spatial resolution and less invasiveness than existing probe and electrode techniques. However, optical mapping on the spatial scale of CELL-MET’s engineered microtissues (~1mm) requires high imaging speed (thousands of images per second) while maintaining good spatial resolution. My research is to build a microscope system in line with these goals.

Conducted engineering trade studies and simulations for integrated optical communications system. Presented findings and recommendations to senior engineers and vice president. Mentored undergraduate intern.

Self-interference in radio signals has long been a problem, limiting operation to half duplex mode (i.e. can only “listen” or “speak” at a time), limiting link capacity, necessitating extra bandwidths, and more. In other words, it necessitates significant extra costs for radio communication. In order to resolve these problems, the preexisting Optical Cancellation System (OCS) project implements self-interference cancellation in order to allow transmit and receipt on the same channel so that the radio will be able to both “listen” and “speak” at the same time.My project is focused on developing a wireless implementation of the OCS which accounts for multi-path propagation and antenna reflections, as well as helping develop an integrated chip version of the OCS.

Worked with image-processing lab group developing optimization techniques for closed-form image matting; tested image matting Matlab code.

Used electrochemical methods with NOVA program in a dry glove-box environment to characterize conjugated aromatic thiophene-based molecules. Presented poster at 2014 ACS conference in San Francisco.

Designed experiment to understand contribution of nuclear recoils in high-purity germanium detector. Developed procedure for calibrating high-purity germanium detector. Selected to present poster at APS conference, but unable to attend due to age requirements.

Helped design and build apparatus to measure resistivity along whole crystal at 77K. Used Hall Effect data to characterize defects in newly grown high-purity germanium (HPGe) crystals.