Hi everyone! My name is Katherine Vasquez, and I’m a first-year PhD student in the Bioengineering Program at Rice. As I mentioned on the first day of class, my dream is to create a wearable biosensor that can continuously monitor a person’s immune status — their risk for developing infections, cancers, or autoimmune diseases.

This project idea was inspired by my niece, who, 16 years ago, had to get a heart transplant when she was only 10 months old. To prevent her body from rejecting her new heart, she had to start taking immunosuppressants. This is standard care for all organ transplant recipients and something they have to do for the rest of their lives.

Because of her weakened immune system, my niece is constantly at a greater risk of developing infections. But we don’t know exactly how much risk she’s facing. That means doctors aren’t really sure what the best immunosuppressant dose is — enough to prevent her body from rejecting her heart but also low enough to minimize her risk of infection. The immune system is dynamic, so having a monitor that could say, “Hey, maybe our immunosuppressant doses are too high right now,” would be a game-changer. And obviously, a technology like this could be useful for so much more than just transplant care.

(Source: my advisor’s paper A physicochemical-sensing electronic skin for stress response monitoring)

And so, that’s where I am! I’m still learning a lot about bioengineering — I kind of stumbled into it a year and a half ago after exploring physics, neuroscience, and UX design. Looking back, each of those areas helped me discover things I enjoy doing and now recognize as what I love about bioengineering: understanding the physical world in a mechanistic way, exploring complex biological networks, and applying creative problem-solving to tackle real-world challenges. I’m so excited to finally start turning these concepts into tangible creations, as my “design thinking” has primarily focused on digital tool design. One of my proudest achievements is creating an application review interface for a nonprofit I worked with. It required a lot of conceptualizing how to organize information on the back end and present it in a simple, intuitive, and user-friendly way on the front end.

I’m looking forward to a great semester! (And learning the skills I need to actually work in my lab, like laser cutting, plasma cutting, and potentially 3D printing…)