Let’s Talk About Tech He’s a physician. She’s an engineer. Terry Sanger and Andrea Armani tackle problems from different directions, but their combined creativity shows the promise of convergent bioscience. On cross-training in convergence Sanger: When I went to school, I was interested in engineering, machine learning and computational neuroscience. And those felds had applications in the medical domain, so I went to medical school just to get the knowledge to apply engineering principles. My research uses engineering methods to understand medical problems. Engineers are people who apply voltages and try to understand how things work mechanistically. For a kid who can’t walk or talk, I try to fgure out what broke, what that part of the brain is supposed to be doing, and what are my options to make it work better.
Terry Sanger THE VITALS Disciplines: Pediatric neurology, electrical engineering and computer science What drives him: He strives to find treatments for dystonia and other childhood movement disorders. Roles: Provost Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Neurology and Biokinesiology at USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Keck School of Medicine of USC; director of Pediatric Movement Disorders Clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; academic director of the Health, Technology and Engineering program, or HTE@USC, which unites physicians and engineers to solve health care problems
Armani: I came from a background of laser optics. As an undergraduate, I was in a physics lab that was beginning to build optical tweezers to study DNA, and I started to see how building a single instrument could open foodgates and enable discoveries. I thought that was incredibly cool, and I realized that instrumentation design was something I really wanted to pursue, so I changed felds from physics to engineering, so I could do research that had a concrete goal. Along the way, I also got a minor in biology. I wanted to have an understanding of biology so I could recognize the interesting questions, even if I couldn’t answer them myself. Most importantly, I wanted to be able to speak the language, and I fnd that helpful as I discuss problems with biologists.
On keeping an open mind Armani: Both parties have to go into a discussion thinking that the other party has something to bring to the table. Te biologist has to be open to the idea that the engineer is going to bring a new way to look at data, and the engineer has to be open to the idea that the biologist will bring new types of data. And that takes a lot of patience. Sanger: You have to recognize that basic concepts of truth can be diferent, and it takes a lot of respect. Respect means you trust that felds that have diferent systems of logic and diferent cultures are nevertheless correct, even if it doesn’t match anything you’ve seen before. And that respect gives you the basis to learn not just the language but also the culture. summer 2014