Hi y’all! My name is Bakai Sheyitov, and I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Rice Bioengineering and MD Anderson Cancer Center. I am originally from Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, and I believe I am the only Kyrgyz citizen on the Rice campus at the moment. I completed my undergrad at Emory University in Atlanta, where I studied chemistry and biology – so engineering is quite new to me! Obviously, as a graduate student, I dedicate most of my time now to my research at Richards-Kortum and Sokolov labs. My project centers on the development of a low-cost microscope for head and neck cancer imaging. Apart from research, I am a member of BIOE-GSA and responsible for organizing the recruitment of new Ph.D. students to our program.

In terms of “making,” in my rather short academic career, I have never really worked with macroscopic, physical objects, let alone made any. In my undergraduate lab at Emory, (shout out to the Salaita group), I was mainly constructing, optimizing, and analyzing assemblies and nanomachines from DNA. A particular system I was working with was a “rolling motor” where DNA-coated nanoparticle would roll on the DNA-laden surface in response to the enzymatic cleavage. I was pretty proud of the construct, and dedicated my undergraduate thesis to it. I guess you can count that as “making”?

In BIOE 555, I am looking forward to all techniques we’ll be doing from sewing to 3D-printing to laser cutting! As someone who is shifting from fundamental sciences to translational research, I also believe this course will help tweak my mindset from analytical mode to the mode of craftsmanship and creativity (if that makes sense).

As for the future, I wish to design accessible and effective microscopes, endoscopes, and other optical technologies to improve cancer diagnosis and patient care in low-resource settings, including in Kyrgyzstan!