Biomed Faculty, Undergraduates Join Superman’s Team
By John Gagnon
Ryan Gilbert has what looks like a dog tag hanging on the wall of his office. Affixed to a small chain is an ornament the size of a half dollar. It bears a Superman logo and the words, “Go forward.” The back side reads, “Christopher Reeve Foundation” — a research initiative established to address the paralysis that proved to be a real, super man’s krypton.
Gilbert, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is inspired by the message as he strives to repair spinal cord injuries and allow paralyzed people to use their limbs again. Gilbert immerses himself in tissue engineering to help regenerate nerves after injury to the spinal cord.
This daunting endeavor is met with indomitable spirit. “We keep this going-forward mentality,” Gilbert says of his work and the students helping him. “When you pick research, you want to pick something that can make a difference in people’s lives. Currently there is nothing that can help these patients with spinal cord injuries. I try to make that evident to the students—that what they’re doing might help somebody some day. We have great students.”
Gilbert’s colleague, Jeremy Goldman, also an assistant professor, says that typically in the US undergraduate students don’t get to participate in research or interact with faculty “in a very serious way.” Their duties, he adds, are usually limited to taking out the trash and washing flasks. Not at Tech, and not in biomedical engineering. Goldman’s students, then, like Gilbert’s, are on the cusp of innovation, working with him on the lymphatic system—specifically trying to reduce edema (abnormal swelling).
The students, Goldman says, grow steadily from neophytes to young scientists. “They read the scientific literature and understand the field—so they appreciate the problems and unanswered questions. They formulate hypotheses, design and run experiments, do the histology and surgery on mice, collect and section tissue specimens, photograph cells, collect data, and report results. They rely heavily on the faculty advisor so they don’t go astray. They get to see several things fail before something succeeds.”
The students and faculty comprise a diverse group, bound by discipline and by a dream of a better life for the rest of the world. They also are decidedly collegial, with faculty and students together celebrating lab successes with movies, picnics, and dinners.
“It takes awhile to get them trained, but they’re extremely enthusiastic, they’re very bright, and they find this fun and exciting,” Goldman says. “They’re doing things that are tedious and sometimes boring, but there are parts of it that are exciting and they just soak it all up and they do well. It’s a great relationship. They’re learning and we’re getting research done.”
Students working with Goldman first and foremost encounter his curiosity. “I’ve always been questioning everything around me,” Goldman says. “Never really accepting things, like diseases, as they are—always wondering why they can’t be a different way.” He imparts that probing attitude to his undergraduate researchers, and describes the collective inquiry simply as “stimulating.”
For his part, Gilbert adds, “I have my door always open to students. They can stop by and ask me questions anytime. That frame of mind is not just my own. It’s everybody here.”
All of it ties in with the vision that Chair Michael Neuman has for the department. “We want,” he concludes, “to do something special very well.”
On Their Way—
Megan Drelles, with a 3.98 grade point average, says she is “relatively gifted in science and math,” and she believes that she must use her talents for the good of others. Drelles does research with Jeremy Goldman, and, in part, she works with mice—creating a wound and then studying the regrowth of the lymphatic vessels—with an eye to adding growth factors to improve what happens naturally. “College research sounds really hard,” she says, “but it’s not super difficult if you get good guidance.”
In 2006 she attended a scientific conference in Switzerland, where she exhibited a poster display of her work—“a very good opportunity.” Drelles, busily involved in student life, describes herself as both disciplined and “a perfectionist.” I like to keep busy,” she says. “It keeps me organized. If I don’t have stuff to do, I feel lost.” Her path, then, is straightforward. In ten years, “I will be a doctor,” she says.
Benton Martin is a fourth-year student who is fervent about biomedical engineering and the problems in the developing world.
Martin is one of a half dozen students working with Ryan Gilbert, whom he calls “inspirational.” Martin’s work involves using hydrogels as links to grow neurons and reconnect a broken spinal cord. He loves the biology side of engineering. “It’s a practical way to help people.” He has attended a biomedical engineering conference in Chicago and says being a researcher “is definitely cool.”
One of Martin’s goals is to help solve social and medical problems around the world. “I’m passionate about social justice,” he says.
Meanwhile, undergraduate research is the most rewarding thing he’s done at Tech. At one point last summer, he mixed two sugars. His advisor, Ryan Gilbert, said, “You just made something that’s never been made before.” Martin will never forget that. “It was rewarding,” he says—“that feeling of ‘wow.’”