#seniorprofile

Edited by: Liz Lat

When Sayo Eweje arrived an campus as a freshman, he was already set on studying biomedical engineering so he could create products and platforms that could have a significant impact on people’s lives by intervening in all sorts of diseases. For the past four years, he’s been working in the lab of lab of Kit Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at #HarvardSEAS, where Eweje has worked on cardiac tissue engineering and vascular endothelial modeling projects. The work he’s done as an undergraduate could someday help scientists better understand how drugs affect the heart, and the potential negative effects that engineered nanomaterials could have on the cells lining the walls of blood vessels. He has also worked to create a tool that could be implemented as a drug-screening platform to aid in the development of therapies for cardiac fibrosis. After graduation, he’ll be enrolling in an M.D./Ph.D. program with the hope of pursuing a research career at the intersection of medicine and engineering. “For me, it all goes back to my passion for problem solving. As an engineer, you acquire skills that ultimately aid you in the development of devices and platforms that can be used to intervene in some problem,” he said. “Working in a lab and conducting research is a good way of getting to the leading edge of whatever problem you’re attempting to solve. Being involved in that process and being able to create something tangible is very exciting to me.”⠀ #Harvard #Harvard19 #student #seniorprofile #research #bioengineering #heart (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByAaOJfnRoo/?igshid=1icnrviw1mouk

Bulgarian-born computer science student Maria Zlatkova found her niche as a teacher for one of Harvard's most popular courses. Initially planning to study pre-med at Harvard, she changed gears into computer science after taking @CS50. Despite having no background in the field, Zlatkova took on a teaching role in the course after her freshman year, later serving as head teaching fellow. Despite the challenges of juggling her own course work and an academic juggernaut with 80 staff and 700 students, she said it was one of her most rewarding experiences at Harvard. "For me, the biggest appeal of computer science was the idea that you can combine these technical computer science skills with almost any other field to make an impact on problems you really care about," she said. "I realized that the skills that I’m getting are going to be worthwhile for whatever I want to do in the future."⠀ #Harvard #HarvardSEAS #Harvard18 #LifeatSEAS #student #seniorprofile #computerscience #teacher #teaching (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

By 2025, more than 1.8 billion people will live in areas suffering from water shortages, yet there are three quadrillion gallons of untapped water in the atmosphere. Low-cost atmospheric water generation systems like fog fences are only able to generate about three liters of water a day, while the cost of high-production, active systems is prohibitive in many developing nations. To bridge this gap, mechanical engineering concentrator Jorrion Wilson, S.B. '18, engineered a device that can produce drinkable water from the air using renewable energy sources. “Approximately every 90 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease. But there is hope because our atmosphere contains enough water to supply the needs of every person on the planet for a year,” he said. “This project will make accessing water more affordable to populations that suffer from water scarcity, and by doing so, it will help alleviate the global water crisis. It could also provide safe, clean water to populations that don’t have clean water sources, reducing the number of deaths caused by lack of clean water.”⠀ #Harvard #Harvard18 #HarvardSEAS #LifeatSEAS #student #seniorprofile #drinkingwater #water #cleanwater #renewableenergy (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

At Harvard, in China, and at the Vatican, electrical engineering concentrator Cameron Akker has fostered a maker mindset. Akker helped establish MakeHarvard, the University’s first engineering hackathon, which brought together 200 students from all over the U.S. who worked at #HarvardSEAS for 24 hours straight to make things. He then took his hackathon expertise to Europe, where he helped lead VHacks, the first-ever hackathon at the Vatican. Over 36 hours, 120 college students from all over the world developed projects in three topic areas: social inclusion, interfaith dialogue, and migrants and refugees. Winning projects included a team that built a public, electronic job board to help the homeless find work, as well as the framework for a new credit system for migrants and refugees in new host countries. Pope Francis concluded the event by congratulating the participants of the hackathon during his Sunday Angelus blessing from the Vatican window. "Hackathons are really are a great way to distill the process of coming up with ideas," he said. "We have this conception that ideas are something you can create with focus groups, with a lot of sitting in a room, writing down words and trying to connect them. But I’ve found that you’re more likely to have ideas when you’re not trying to have ideas, you just stumble across them. A hackathon is a chance to fail without worrying about failing. It’s a chance to do something for no client, for no purpose, for no grade—do something for the sake of doing something new."⠀ #Harvard #Harvard18 #LifeatSEAS #student #seniorprofile #hackathon #ideas #engineering #Vatican (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)

Applied math concentrator Diondra Peck, A.B. ’17, has set her sights on using computer vision techniques to improve medical diagnoses. During her time at Harvard, she has worked in the lab of Gabriel Kreiman, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at @harvardmed, where she built computer better models that have better object recognition, with the ultimate goal of helping radiologists better identify tumors in diagnostic images. That work informed her senior thesis project, which involved building contextually aware computer vision models. "Computer vision models are good at basic object recognition—the computer recognizes an apple in the grocery store because it has seen apples before. But a human also understands context, so he or she would know it is an apple because it is sitting next to oranges in the fruit aisle," she said. "My hope is that we can find a way to quantify that context mathematically and incorporate it into an algorithm that can help computer vision models work like a human brain." Read more about Diondra, her work at #harvardseas, and her future plans at http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/05/student-profile-diondra-peck-ab-17 #LifeatSEAS #Harvard #Harvard17 #student #profile #seniorprofile #bioengineering #appliedmath #computervision #radiology (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)