Gianna Busch is a third-year biomedical engineering student. This past summer she acted as a research intern for the Vanderbilt Biophotonics Center. Below she discusses departmental guidance, research experience, and aspirations to pursue a PhD post-graduation.
I have been planning to go graduate school since I was a freshman in college. Both of my parents have engineering degrees, and my mother went on to get her masters. However, I was only planning to get my masters degree. After spending my summer working as a research intern in the Vanderbilt Biophotonics Center, my plans for my future changed.
I first heard about this opportunity through Dr. Rao’s weekly emails to the BME Department. I had been on the hunt for a summer opportunity – either an internship or a research program – and I still wasn’t sure of my plans so I decided to just go ahead and apply. I ended up getting into the program and I was very excited! However, although I work in Dr. Quinn’s lab and many of our projects involve multiphoton microscopy, I had never actually worked on those parts of the projects and I was very unfamiliar with Biophotonics in general. I was definitely a bit nervous moving to Nashville and starting my program, but I was also very excited to learn more about a new field of biomedical engineering and hopefully get some more insight into what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
At the Vanderbilt Biophotonics Center, I worked in the lab of Dr. Anita Mahadevan-Jansen with one of her grad students, Sean Fitzgerald. Her lab’s main focus is applying optical techniques for use in diagnosis and neuromodulation. The three main research areas of her lab are optical diagnostics, neurophotonics, and image-guided surgical techniques. I was assigned to work on the Scanned Oblique Plane Illumination (SOPi) microscope. The Biophotonics Center is building the SOPi microscope with the assistance of the Kozorovitskiy Lab at Northwestern University, where it was first developed. Eventually, the Vanderbilt SOPi will be used in a similar way to the Multiphoton Microscope here at the University of Arkansas, with other lab groups and researchers able to come and image their samples with it. While I was at Vanderbilt, the microscope was not yet ready for use by other researchers. However, I spent the summer learning how it worked, practicing how to image with it, and conducting image analysis on some of our test samples. Although I love my research and lab at the University of Arkansas, it was valuable to experience different projects and technologies, as well as working under a different PI in a different lab culture.
In addition to the research aspect of the program, the Biophotonics Center also organized weekly professional development sessions for all of the research environments. We covered topics ranging from financial responsibility to applying for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to what to expect from life as a grad student. It was through these sessions that I learned about the job opportunities available to me if I decided to pursue a Ph.D. Although I was already planning to go into Research & Development after college, I learned about how earning a Ph.D. would enable you to successfully manage projects from start to finish and lead teams of other people. I am now planning to earn my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering after I graduate from the University of Arkansas. I absolutely love getting to be a part of biomedical research, and I am looking forward to pursuing a career path that will allow me to take on more of a leading role in my projects. I plan to use the rest of my time at the University of Arkansas to further my research, determine what I would like to specialize in for my graduate research, and hopefully participate in another research program next summer to get an even better idea of the opportunities available to me.