Tag: cockroach lab

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Penn Bioengineering Cockroach Lab Featured in Popular Mechanics

Every Penn Bioengineering semester culminates in a series of “demo days” — dedicated time in which undergraduate Bioengineering students demonstrate projects made in their Bioengineering lab courses or in Senior Design for their classmates and faculty. These are held in the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace (or the Penn BE Labs), the dedicated teaching lab for the Bioengineering Department which also functions as an interdisciplinary bio-makerspace open to the entire Penn community.

For the Fall 2023 demos, Popular Mechanics paid a visit to the BE Labs to witness the (in)famous “cockroach lab,” a staple of the third year course “Bioengineering, Modeling, Analysis, and Design Laboratory” (affectionately known as BE MAD). This year’s cockroach demos featured a miniature Taylor Swift — flaunting a cockroach limb — and several projects featuring the faces of course faculty, David Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor in Bioengineering and Senior Associate Dean in Penn Engineering, and Michael Patterson, Director of Educational Laboratories in Bioengineering.

Read “How Severed Cockroach Legs Could Help Us ‘Fully Rebuild’ Human Bodies” in Popular Mechanics.

Read more stories featuring the Penn BE Labs in the BE Blog here.

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Student Spotlight: Jerry Gao

Ego of the Week: Jerry Gao
Jerry Gao (photo credit: Nathaniel Babitts)

Fourth year undergraduate Jerry Gao (BE ’23) is the latest student featured in 34th Street Magazine’s “Ego of the Week” series. Jerry, who hails from Coppell, TX, majors in Bioengineering with a minor in Asian American Studies. In addition to his academic studies, he is passionate about education and literacy, working with The Signal, the Asian Pacific American Leadership Initiative, and the Penn Reading Initiative. In this Q&A, he discusses the sense of community that brought him to Penn, the love of cooking (and gifting food to his friends) that powers his @gaos_chows Instagram account, and his experience as a student and now TA in Penn Bioengineering’s “BE MAD” lab class:

“Now that you’re on your way to graduating, what have been your favorite classes or experiences in Bioengineering or Asian American Studies?

‘In terms of bioengineering, there’s definitely a clear favorite that I have. It’s actually the class I’m a TA for right now. It’s “Bioengineering Modeling, Analysis, and Design,” and it’s basically the lab that all junior bioengineers take. There’s one particular lab we do in the class that always catches everyone’s attention; it’s called the cockroach lab. I think it’s one of the biggest reasons why people want to study bioengineering at Penn in particular.

It’s a segue into prosthetics and different medical devices that can help restore people’s limb functions. We order hundreds of cockroaches and then we put them in a little bit of an ice bath to anesthetize. We amputate their legs, which will essentially serve as our prosthetics, and then implant metal electrodes into two different spots of the leg. Then, we go into our computer program and type different lines of code that can help replicate different signal waves to move the legs. If you submit a wave with a particular frequency and particular amplitude, it’ll cause a leg to move in one direction, and if you do a different combination of the amplitude and frequency, it’ll cause it to move in the other direction. The next task is to trace the end of the leg and try to choreograph the leg to spell the letters B and E for bioengineering. It’s so fun to be able to see what combination of leg movements in the servo motor can form the backbone of the B for example, what can form the three lines of the E. I would say that’s probably my favorite moment in the bioengineering department.'”

Read “Ego of the Week: Jerry Gao” in 34th Street.

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Student Spotlight: David Alanis Garza

David Alanis Garza (BSE & BS 2021)

The Penn Bioengineering student spotlight series continues with David Alanis Garza. David is a senior from Monterrey, Mexico finishing his dual degree in Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Health Care Management at the Wharton School, with minors in Chemistry and Math. He currently serves as the Captain of the Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT), managing clinical operations and the organization’s response to COVID-19. He is also a Penn tour guide and a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. In his free time, he enjoys mountain climbing, camping, and playing guitar.

What drew you to the field of Bioengineering?

I first became interested in BE during my high school physics class, in which my teacher motivated our lesson in electromagnetism by explaining the basics behind an MRI machine and how defibrillators are basically glorified capacitors. I realized that my lifelong dream to be a surgeon would best be served if I armed myself with a scalpel and screwdriver alike. With the fast paced advances in the medical field, the best physicians must not only understand the underlying pathophysiology of disease, but also how to interact with and keep up with innovations in the biomedical engineering field. At Penn, I have enjoyed discovering that BE is much more wide than what I initially appreciated.

Have you ever done research with a professor on campus? What did you like, and what didn’t you like about it?

I have had the opportunity to work in the Center for Resuscitation Science on a research project investigating diagnostic patterns in the electrocardiogram of Pulseless Electrical Activity (PEA). I truly enjoyed the opportunity to take on more responsibility as the first author of the manuscript we are currently working on, and learned so much about communication in science when presenting the research during American Heart Association’s Resuscitation Science Symposium this last weekend. What I learned in Bioengineering, especially in BE 309/310 (Lab) and BE 301 (Signals and Systems), has been incredibly useful for my research. I am also currently completing a Wharton senior thesis exploring how financial derivative securities could be used to hedge risk in emergency departments. Penn is incredibly supportive of students seeking to gain more research experience, offering an abundance of opportunities for guided and independent projects. I truly enjoyed the opportunity of finding answers to very specific questions in my fields, as well as the valuable relationships with my mentors I formed along the way.

What have been some of your favorite courses and/or projects in Bioengineering so far?

BE 305 (Engineering Principles of Human Physiology) has been my favorite course at Penn. In this class, we were able to understand, quantify, and hack the body’s physiology through an engineering lens. From building a pulseoximeter with our phone cameras, to determining the blood volume of the left ventricle over time with MRI images, this class was very much hands on. A close second is BE 301 (Bioengineering Signals and Systems). I hadn’t previously grasped how this discipline was relevant to medicine until this class, but now I find myself applying what I learned in my research. Lastly, as many other BE students will tell you, the human-cockroach machine interface project in BE lab has been one of my most challenging and rewarding undertakings at Penn. Our team linked a wearable device that measured the forearms position and muscle contractions, so that when the wearer painted a picture, a cockroach leg would be moved and stimulated to paint an imitation of the image. Overcoming my phobia of cockroaches and the countless hours of trial and error were all worth it, for I can now brag about how my team made an artist out of a cockroach leg.

What advice would you give to your freshman self?

It is a great idea to identify which area of BE research you are interested in, and plan your academics so that you can take the closely related courses early on. This will empower you to conduct research with greater responsibilities or give you marketable skills that employers may look for when hiring for internships of your interest. BE upperclassmen are always willing to help, so feel free to reach out to us for any advice.

What do you hope to pursue after obtaining your undergraduate degree?

I will be taking a gap year in which I will be working in the area of hospital administration and clinical engineering before I begin my medical school journey. As of right now, I am interested in specializing in emergency medicine or surgery, but I know my interests may change as my understanding of medicine grows throughout the next years.

Have you done or learned anything new or interesting during quarantine?
The COVID pandemic gave me a unique opportunity to manage the clinical operations of MERT’s emergency medical services during an unprecedented challenge. As a result, I learned a lot about how different hospitals and health care systems are managing their response, not to mention the standard protocols to ensure the safety and wellness of our patients and providers. On a less professional note, I have been able to get a bit better at chess and guitar.
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Student Spotlight: Raveen Kariyawasam

Raveen Kariyawasam (BSE & BS ’21)

The first in our new student spotlight series is junior Raveen Kariyawasam. Raveen (BSE & BS ’21) is a dual degree student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Wharton, studying Bioengineering, Finance, and Management.

 

 

 

 

What drew you to the field of Bioengineering?

Growing up in Sri Lanka and being surrounded by relatives who were doctors, I have been fascinated by both modern and traditional medicine. However, during physician shadowing in high school, I came to the realization that I was far more fascinated with the technology doctors use rather than practicing medicine. Therefore, I made the decision to turn down studying medicine in the U.K. and come to Penn to study Bioengineering in the hopes of being more hands-on with medical technology.

Have you done research with a professor on campus? What did you like, and what didn’t you like about it?

I currently work in the Interventional Radiology Lab at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) under Assistant Professor of Radiology Chamith Rajapakse. The best thing about research here is that I get to be hands-on with some of the most cutting edge technology in the world and help pioneer medical diagnostic techniques that aren’t traditionally being used anywhere else. The only downside is that the learning curve can be a little too steep.

What have been some of your favorite courses and/or projects in Bioengineering so far?

Without a doubt, my favorite BE class has to be BE 309 (Bioengineering Modeling, Analysis and Design Laboratory I) and especially the Computer-Cockroach Interface we have to develop for this lab.

What advice would you give to your freshman self?

There are way too many things happening at a given time at Penn. Take it easy and plan it out so you can do everything you want to! It’s totally possible. Who says you can’t work hard and play hard?!

What do you hope to pursue after obtaining your undergraduate degree?

My hope is to head my own health-tech startup and create technologies that will aid developing countries, starting out with my humble island of Sri Lanka first.