Hello BIOE 677-1, my name is Jhalak Mehta and I am a graduate student in the Global Medical Innovation program. I am originally from Chicago, Illinois and I did my undergraduate in bioengineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. This is my first year in Houston, Texas so I am really excited to get started at Rice University and live so close to the Texas Medical Center. I also have a whole list of restaurants that I am wanting to try this year. I spent this past summer interning in Costa Rica at a company called Meditek. As a field engineer, I spent my day traveling to multiple hospitals throughout the country to perform preventive and corrective maintenance on medical devices such as anesthesia machines, smart beds, fetal monitors, EKG machines, vital monitors, X-ray machines, and many more! At Rice, I work at the Kelley Center at the Fondren library, and I am excited to attend some of the Bioengineering GSA events to meet some more fellow Bioengineering students!

What is one thing that I have made that I am proud of?

One thing I am proud of is the senior design project my team and I worked on during my undergraduate years. We built an ex-vivo tissue biopsy imager for a more accurate margin analysis for head and neck cancer surgeries. While working on this project, we were exposed to fluoresence-guided imaging, Monte Carlo simulations, phantom making, and the raspberry pi Linux. Since we wanted the image of the tissue to be captured by moving the lens in a linear motion along all three of the axes (similar to the head movement of a 3D printer!), we decided to use the 3D printer as our base and add/replace parts to build our final prototype. 

What is one thing that I want to make?
I am interested in point-of-care diagnostics. Therefore, one thing I want to make in the future is a COVID-19 breathalyzer that can also be further applied to other respiratory diseases. This is something that I worked on a little during my undergraduate years when we worked on identifying biomarkers in a COVID-infected lung. This research was still in its initial stages, but eventually, once the research is finished, I hope it can be translated into something useful!

What is one thing that I hope to learn in ENGI 210?
From ENGI 210, I hope to gain core hands-on engineering skills such as using a laser cutter, 3D printer, metal 3D printer, sewing machine, and molding devices that we otherwise would never gain in any of our other engineering courses. I am also looking forward to the assigned projects that will force us to think creatively such as the midterm mechanical movements project.