Humans of BSOE

"I feel very fortunate and blessed to work with the people that I do, because everyone cares so much about the students and doing the right thing. They have made what I thought would be an impossible situation possible."

"Change is coming, and I'm excited for it."

I spent many years in the reading room when radiologists were reading and looking at the patient images and observing what their struggles are... I think that [my device] could be very instrumental in helping a radiologist to improve head and neck cancer management.

It is important to have a community, especially for students of color because it's easy to feel like you're erased, that you don't belong somewhere because historically you're not a part of that group, but things have to change and things are changing, and it's so important to have diversity in tech.

The Ph.D. experience allowed me to mature as a person. I learned to function in an environment where I had to figure out the parameters myself. I came out of UCSC with self confidence and the ability to figure out a solution and explain it to an audience.

What I would consider to be a career well-performed would be one in which I would be able to answer this question: How do stem cells think?

I sat in on some of the seminars in Professor Derrell Long’s group in the Storage Systems Research Center. They have a seminar every week, and I came and listened to all the grad students talk about how they were progressing on their research projects, and that made me want to pursue graduate school.

I love the fact that [my lab] will encourage you no matter what you want to research on... They are really open to listening, and not just listening but also discussing, and they won’t put you down if your ideas don’t match theirs. There is a lot of healthy discussion going on all the time, even during lunch breaks.

My research revolves around preventing pressure injuries... A lot of research is about developing a specific new technology that will prevent pressure injuries, but I am kind of taking a more system approach for which you can use any technology and apply it.

I feel like I have had such incredible mentors at UCSC, and so much of what I have learned and the passion that I have developed for bioinformatics has been a product of the wonderful mentorship that I have had around me, so it has been really great to be able to take that full circle and provide that same thing for other undergraduate students.

My research focuses mainly on different applications of machine learning and deep learning in the medical field for diagnosing different diseases. For example, I am working with the UC San Francisco Epilepsy Lab to try to predict the onset of seizures in patients and detect if there is a way to identify factors that have to do with initiation and termination of seizures so that we can kind of control patients between these two.