Hi everyone, I’m Juliana and am looking forward to meeting you all this semester. I’m a first-year PhD student in bioengineering, originally from southeast Wisconsin.

During my master’s thesis, I had the opportunity to gain prototyping experiencing working on developing an experimental platform to stretch an in vitro nerve model, and am particularly proud of the stretchable PDMS cell culture dish I designed to interface with a stretching device (seen in the photo below).

I am not quite sure what new things I will get to design in my future research, but am looking forward to learning basic design principles in BIOE 555 that will improve my ability to design and make new things using a strategic and structured approach. I am also looking forward to learning more shop skills and how to work with different materials, as my previous prototyping experience is fairly limited to 3D resin printing.