Sanofi’s formal early career mentor program matches Mentors (Sanofi industry professionals) with Mentees (students) to enhance the Mentees’professional development. Mentees gain proficiencies in career competencies, build leadership skills, create their own Sanofi-supported route into early career opportunities, and establish lasting relationships with professionals and peers.

Project: Engineering Immune-Competent Vascularized Models for Studying Liver Metabolic Disease -Running assays on media collected from in vitro vascular and hepatocyte networks, grown in vascularized liver models, to determine how they differentially respond to media formulations that represent diseased type 2 diabetes states-Performing PDMS device fabrication of microfluidic tissue culture platforms

-Communicate with industry connections for partnerships on events for the group (e.g. research talks, resume reviews, lab tours) in order to connect about 200 club members to industry research, internships, and job opportunities -Plan research mixers in collaboration with MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) to connect undergraduate students to graduate students looking to mentor undergraduate researchers

-Taught a tissue culture workshop to ten students new to tissue culture, in which they cultured rings of muscle tissue that are able to generate a force around a soft PDMS skeleton -Taught a 6-week introduction to bioengineering seminar to 8 first-years, for which I developed weekly lesson plans; fabricated, inoculated, and characterized microbial fuel cells; and led microbial culturing in-lab sessions-Handle the group’s funding, build semester budgets, and establish collaborations with other campus biotech student groups

Project: Discovering the role that histidine-containing dipeptides have in intracellular H+ buffering and mitochondrial thermogenic capacity in brown adipose tissue-Supplemented differentiated brown adipocyte cultures with metabolites, followed by quantified differential expression of key thermogeic genes using qPCR and measured effects on mitochondrial respiration through Seahorse assays-Harvested supplemented adipocytes for LC-MS based specific metabolomics to determine take up and degradation dynamics of the different supplemented metabolites in the cells-Performed a chronic beta-alanine supplementation study in 12 male wild type C57BL/6J mice, in which half the mice were given water with 1% beta alanine for four weeks prior to injection with norepinephrine, followed by measures of oxygen consumption using Sable Systems metabolic cages

Project: developing a chemostatic 3D tissue culture system with engineering precision for long-term organotypic culture for the purpose of studying tumor-host-microbiome interactions-Designing and fabricating PDMS microfluidic chips as platforms for colon organoid culture, using photolithography and soft lithography techniques-Constructed a flow system with low oxygen permeability to support the formation of an oxygen gradient across the microfluidic tissue culture device -Measured, processed, and visualized oxygen gradients in the microfluidic chip using LabView, MATLAB, & COMSOL-Gained experience maintaining Caco-2 and patient-derived normal and tumor colon organoid cultures, and performing immunohistochemistry staining on tissue sections cultured in the tissue culture system-Write up protocols for experiments designed to improve the system and present project updates at weekly lab meetings

-Executed audio signal processing labs using Python to extract information about the body (ex: using the Fourier transform to determine what frequencies are present in a person’s voice)-Collaborated with two team members to design and present a research proposal for the automation of insulin delivery in diabetes patients during the menstrual cycle through a closed-loop biosensing and drug delivery system-Authored an informative science article on acoustic speech analysis of patients with decompensated heart failure