ISSUE NO. 8 | DECEMBER 2020
WiE - UC Newsletter IEEE Student Branch of the UC - Women in Engineering Affinity Group
ISSUE NO. 8 | DECEMBER 2020
IEEE WiE interviews Inês Machado Inês Machado holds a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of New University of Lisbon (FCT, UNL). Inês developed her master’s thesis at Champalimaud Foundation (CF), in Lisbon, under the supervision of Professors Hugo Gamboa (FCT, UNL), Vítor Paixão (CF) and Rui Costa (CF) entitled "Human Activity Data Discovery based on Accelerometry". During her master’s, Inês Machado implemented a publiclyavailable algorithm for convenient monitoring of detailed ambulatory movements in daily life, using a portable accelerometer device. The focus of the work was the discovery of the information hidden in the signals produced by an accelerometer, interpreting them in terms of human movement and identifying clinically relevant parameters from the information obtained. Between 2015-2019, Inês was a Ph.D. candidate from the MIT Portugal Program at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, UL) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) under the supervision of Professors Jorge Martins (IST, UL), Sarah Frisken (HMS) and Polina Golland (MIT). Her Ph.D. focused on developing new methods and technologies to improve precision in imageguided neurosurgery. The research outputs of Inês work granted her two national awards, the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge award in 2013 (“Is there hidden information in my movement?”) and in 2020 (“Sneaking into the brain with a new GPS-like technology”). Inês is currently a Research Associate and Teaching Assistant in Medical Image Computing and Computer Programming at King’s College London working with Professors Julia Schnabel and Andrew King on developing machine/deep learning algorithms for an integrated framework of image acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis.
1. Why did you choose biomedical engineering? And why did you decide to pursue a research career (Ph.D.)? I liked the concept of merging engineering and medicine, so I chose Biomedical Engineering (BME). One key skill of the Biomedical Engineer is the ability to understand complex medical problems and use engineering methods to solve them and this often includes being part of a multidisciplinary team where the Biomedical Engineer "works" both sides of the problem. BME is a relatively new field that involves designing and creating medical and healthcare technology and one of the great things about doing a PhD in BME is that you will be able to conduct your own research. If your thesis and your findings are strong and relevant, other experts within your chosen area of academia will reference your work and your discoveries when teaching future students. How cool is that? [Laughs]
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2. What can you say to encourage colleagues who are taking a Ph.D. but are struggling? It is true that I had difficulties from time to time in my experiments. You learn how to get up by falling. The ground itself offers the gift of a new perspective, so allow yourself the time to lie still for as long as you need to. In other words, there will be obstacles, challenges that will have you halfway out the door… but also at the edge of your seat, for once you deconstruct them you will be on the other side, on a brand new side that didn’t before exist. I know it can feel like a lonely journey, but reach out to your surrounding community, talk about what you’re working on, what you’re up to. Connection will see you through and also up the level of the celebration. And after your many years of hard work, you can indulge in the luxury of having Dr as your title… [Laughs] 3. What are the most challenging aspects of a Ph.D.? And the most gratifying ones? It can be a lonely and disconnecting journey. It sometimes feels like you are living in two different worlds that don’t seem to understand each other. There are moments when they meet though, when you come across someone who not only listens and understands, but also elevates your work by thinking it through with you. There’s a lot you write never to see the light of day, deadends and instants when you seem to have lost your way and train of thought, not being able to tell which direction to take. All of this can be daunting, but it is at the same time some of what makes it exciting - the sense of discovery! Also, if you are fortunate to find a supervisor and a team that nurtures you, like I did, you will find motivation in their energy, their shared knowledge and their dedication to their own work. 4. What part of what you do, you love the most? Seeing the ripples of the impact my work has on people’s lives. We are not making science for science. We are making science for the benefit of humanity. As a Biomedical Engineer, I was given the incredible opportunity to create life-changing and even life-saving devices. For instance, I dedicated haha
my Ph.D. to developing software that allows brain tumors to be removed with a higher level of precision. As you know, our brain is responsible for our essential functions – including movement, language, and sight – and many of the areas that help to define us – such as our thoughts and emotions. And as you can imagine there can be high risks for surgical procedures involving the brain as tumors are often located around critical brain structures and damaging these structures can cause loss of brain function. So, the primary goal in brain surgery is to maximize the extent of tumor resection while minimizing damage to surrounding brain tissue. However, one of the major obstacles in this kind of surgery is distinguishing healthy tissue from tumor tissue. For you to have an idea, if we open the skull and look at the brain with the naked eye, healthy brain tissue and the brain tumor appear almost identical. We needed to have a way to know where the tumor is during surgery. During my Ph.D., I implemented an extensively-tested and publicly-available real-time intraoperative imaging solution for tracking the position of the tumor that leads to a more complete removal of pathologies and helps to avoid important damage to neural structures, which results in a decrease in patient morbidity and mortality and decrease of healthcare cost. Seeing the impact of my work on people’s lives is very gratifying. 5. Have you ever felt any kind of discrimination (during your academic and professional career) for being a woman? I consider myself privileged. I’ve had the pleasure of working at several institutions from different countries and I was always made to feel at home, like I belonged right where I was, just as I was. Having such an atmosphere allowed me to dive fearlessly into my work, always taking one step further, knowing that my team had my back. 6. What advice do you have for young women that want to get into tech and do not know where to start? Ask questions, find what tickles your curiosity, and pursue it with all you might. Make connections. Don’t be afraid of loving hj
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something you don’t yet understand. Don’t be afraid to change your mind, to change your path once you’ve started it. Don’t be afraid of an apparent lack of destination, you are creating your own journey. Just because there doesn’t seem to be anyone who looks like you in a particular field, it doesn’t mean you don’t belong. Take your space. 7. What is the best advice you have ever received? "In order to have an impact, to leave the world differently than the world that you entered, you need to take the unpaved road. And the unpaved road will take you somewhere you don't know."
Achievement MOLLY SHOICHET This year’s $1 million Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal has been awarded to Dr. Molly Shoichet for the development of hydrogels which mimic human tissues. Previously, scientists were restricted to creating cells as two-dimensional models – human beings are not, however, twodimensional; in order to obtain the closest results possible to our body’s environment, a three-dimensional model is required. Dr. Shoichet’s hydrogels are able to achieve just that, making way for a critical advance in the areas of tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and pharmaceutical testing.
8. What do you expect for the future? I expect more challenges, ideas, extraordinary outcomes and endless ripples. It always feels like it’s just the beginning, even when you’re at the end of a particular project. There’s still so much to uncover, to understand, different dots to connect into whole new strategies to expand the world of possibility in biomedical engineering.
We are sure that her contribution to Science is only starting now!
Carolina Travassos
In recent years, Dr. Shoichet’s hydrogels have proved to be invaluable for numerous applications – such as: promoting the survival rate for stem cell transplants, which is “key to restoring vision, as well as repairing the strokeinjured brain and the injured spinal cord”; improving the efficiency of drug-related tests for a rare lung disease by mimicking the disease’s conditions, which can be modeled after other diseases. It will be more than exciting to see what other breakthroughs these hydrogels may trigger in the coming years.
SOURCE: SHOICHETLAB.UTORONTO.CA
Sarah Holm
ISSUE NO. 8 | DECEMBER 2020
Biography HEDY LAMARR Born in Vienna at the very start of the first World War, Hedwig Eva Kiesler, now known as Hedy Lamarr, was the only child of her Jewish family. Her father was a bank director who was passionate about engineering and inspired Hedy to look at the world with inquisitive eyes. Her mother was a concert pianist who introduced her to the arts, which eventually pushed Hedy to an early start at an acting career when she was only 16. SOURCE: INDEPENDENT.CO.UK
She studied acting in Berlin, and starred in her first role in 1930, in a small independent film called “Geld auf der Stra β e” (“Money on the Street”). She got married in 1933 to Fritz Mandl, a controlling man with ties to the Nazi party. She divorced him and fled to London in 1937, where she met Louis B. Mayer, of the MGM studios. This chance meeting became her ticket to Hollywood, and she went on to become a prolific movie star in America. In the US, her early interest in science and engineering resurfaced, and she became interested in innovations on wartime engineering. In 1940, she met George Antheil at a dinner party. He was a known writer and composer who shared the same inventive spirit as Hedy. They both shared concerns about the upcoming war, and in a few months they began working on ideas to combat the axis powers. They came up with a new communication system used to guide torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target.
After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. Their patent expired before either of them got credit for it. While Hedy continued to accumulate fame in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until old age that she received any awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Hedy Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.
Her contributions to science are still just as relevant today as they would have been in the midst of WWII.
Leticia Simon
ISSUE NO. 8 | DECEMBER 2020
Curiosity of the month... You probably know Natalie Portman from countless successful movies like Star Wars, Thor and Black Swan, for which she received an Oscar and a Golden Globe, but did you know she was an aspiring academic? While in high school, Natalie reached the semi-finals of the Intel Science Talent Search, a prestigious research-based science competition in the US which led her to co-author a paper titled “A Simple Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar”. She then attended Harvard and graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Many state that her psychology background has helped her to become such a great actress!
SOURCE: BUSINESSINSIDER.IN
Beatriz Santos
Merry Christmas