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Bioengineering student went from Patriot to Pilgrim for summer internship

Shayla Brown — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:51:00 +0000

Bioengineering student went from Patriot to Pilgrim for summer internship  Shayla Brown Fri, 09/06/2024 - 11:51

��AV bioengineering student Berk Kasimcan spent his summer internship working on a proof of concept for what could be described as sunglasses for buildings. 

Kasimcan is working alongside Harvard University psychology students and second-year PhD engineering and computing student Raphael Kay as they attempt to alleviate the damage that buildings experience throughout the years from radiation, heat, cold, and light. 

“What if we create this glass system that has various liquids inside and is able to adjust the building temperature or the [impact of] the direct UV light?” Kasimcan said. “This research would be especially helpful for newer buildings that are made of mostly glass.” 

Berk Kasimcan. Photo provided.

Kasimcan’s internship took place in two lab locations on Harvard’s campus —the Aizenberg Biomineralization and Biomimetics Lab in the Science and Engineer Complex and the Center for Nanoscale Systems. The research being conducted is fairly new and led by Kay, who is also one of Kasimcan’s mentors.

“The environments are super-fast paced and each university has their own culture when doing research, so I get to learn a lot of different ways to conduct important research,” said Kasimcan.   

The Aizenberg lab is similar to the MIX here at George Mason, but with more of a focus on engineering. The Center for Nanoscale Systems is where students work on decomposition and microscopic materials too small to be seen unaided by the human eye and requires researchers to wear full-body clean room suits, Kasimcan explained. 

The team built a total of four setups this summer to measure how much light and heat is getting deflected, and how much heat transfer is present. 

 “Our goal for this summer is to build test benches. Once we perfect our devices and formulas, we will actually be able to use the test benches to get reliable results on light and heat detection,” said Kasimcan, who is enrolled in George Mason’s accelerated master’s bioengineering program.    

Berk Kasimcan at Harvard University Campus. Photo provided.

Kasimcan, who is in the Honors College, credits the mentorship he received at George Mason from associate professor of bioengineering Shani Ross and assistant professor of bioengineering Quentin Sanders, as well as his senior design project experience, for helping to prepare him for this internship. 

Working with Sanders in his Intelligent assistive technology, Neuromuscular control and Physiology, Wearables and Rehabilitation Robotics (ImPoWeR) lab for a year was great experience, Kasimcan said. “I worked on research addressing rehabilitation, robotics, and developed exoskeletons and prosthetic devices for individuals that have experienced a neurological injury or amputation.”

The feeling was mutual, according to Sanders. “It was a pleasure working with Berk. With his work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and general interest in the biomedical sciences, I can see him working at a top tier company within the health care industry,” said Sanders.  

“I’m sure he’ll do great wherever he ends up. I wouldn't be surprised at all if I looked up one day and Berk was the leading scientist in the research and development division of a huge company,” he added.  

Kasimcan, along with his peers, spent a year working on hydrogel research with the goal of creating a water filtration system in the event of an emergency so communities can access clean water.    

“It’s not something we can use 24/7 unfortunately, but when it comes to emergencies, it was a pretty useful device,” said Kasimcan. 

For their efforts, Kasimcan and his teammates won multiple awards including two People’s Choice Awards for engineering from George Mason’s Bioengineering Department and 2nd Place in a Star-Tides Poster Competition.

Kasimcan graduated with a bachelor of science from George Mason in spring 2024 and is currently pursuing his master's in engineering.

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Shani Ross

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How nano roughness could smooth out clotting risks

Nathan Kahl — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 18:39:25 +0000

How nano roughness could smooth out clotting risks Nathan Kahl Thu, 09/05/2024 - 14:39

When doctors and medical technicians place a device in the human body, any number of things can go wrong. Ensuring the materials used in those devices interact appropriately and safely with human tissue is a key component to positive long-term health outcomes.

Ketul Popat, chair bioengineering department.
Photo by Office of University Branding

Ketul Popat, chair of the ��AV Department of Bioengineering and a medical materials expert, has a grant from the National Institutes of Health for approximately $200,000 to address an unintended consequence of device implementation—blood clots.

As many as 6% of the more-than one million Americans who have a stent or heart valve implanted each year face a risk of thrombosis, a potentially deadly condition occurring when a clot blocks a blood vessel. For Popat and his collaborators, it’s not just about what the material is made of, but the nature of the very surface of the material.

But Popat said, “Sometimes we just put materials in the body because they work, knowing they are going to fail in several years and we’ll replace them. So it becomes really important to design the surface of the material of an implant so that when it is in contact with tissue, it is not a mismatch to the structural features of the tissue.”

Our blood’s ability to clot is generally a welcomed response, preventing excessive bleeding following an injury and helping to start and speed the healing process. Of course, this characteristic can also be problematic, resulting in clots that can lead to strokes, heart attacks, and other dangers.

A depiction of a stent in a vein. iStock photo

Popat believes a way to decrease clotting that may occur because of the devices is with surface manipulation, tricking the blood cells, in a sense. “Rough surfaces have different clotting properties than smooth surfaces. Now if we can create rough surfaces that are systematic and repeatable, the cells in the blood will sense these nano features and perform their function differently than if they move past a flat surface.” Popat says he and colleagues believe the nano rough surfaces work well at reducing blood clots because blood cells are used to it–surfaces of the blood vessels they flow through have a similar nanostructure.

Microscopic image of titania nanotubes on the surface of titanium, each measuring approximately 100 nanometers across. Photo provided

In addition to manipulating the surface material, the researchers are coating them with a substance tanfloc, a condensed tannin that is typically used for water purification. Previous studies show that the combination of these techniques–rough nanosurfaces covered in tanfloc–reduces the likelihood of blood clots.

The unpredictability of clotting makes this research particularly important, especially in a world where approximately 20 million people die every year due to cardiovascular disease.

“Some people get a stent, and they are fine for the rest of their lives, and some people get a stent and in the first few years they experience blood clotting. It’s very patient-specific, and unfortunately you just don’t know until you put it in,” Popat said.

Popat said the goal goes beyond simply preventing the clots. “Eventually, we want the cells around the stent to grow on top of the stent and over it. We don’t just want to control clotting, but we also want the stent to truly integrate with, and become part of, the body.”

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Local high schoolers discover bioengineering at George Mason’s BioE Buzz Summer Camp

Teresa Donnellan — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 15:18:20 +0000

Local high schoolers discover bioengineering at George Mason’s BioE Buzz Summer Camp Teresa Donnellan Mon, 07/08/2024 - 11:18

A group of local rising high school juniors and seniors attended the BioE Buzz Summer Camp at ��AV in June. Organized by the Department of Bioengineering’s Internship Coordinator and Adjunct Professor Carolyn Wilson, the four-day camp introduced campers to the discipline’s applications in solving medical problems.

Research Assistant Professor David Lemonnier works with a student. Photo by Eduardo Macedo/Office of University Branding

Throughout the week, campers met graduate and undergraduate students and faculty, received tours of George Mason's state-of-the-art research facilities and the Fairfax Campus, and participated in lab activities led by faculty on such topics as molecular biology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, ultrasound technology, and community-engaged design.

Hands-on experiences allowed students to apply their knowledge and develop their interests in practical settings.

One activity, led by Associate Professor Remi Veneziano and doctoral student Dylan Scarton, introduced the campers to DNA origami through a lab that involved gel electrophoresis.

Doctoral student Zahra Taghizadeh led an activity about muscle movement. Photo by Eduardo Macedo/Office of University Branding

In addition, the students learned some basics about sterile technique and gained hands-on experience in cell culture during an activity led by doctoral student Bryce Dunn.

Another activity, led by postdoctoral researcher J. Jesus Hernandez-Perez, involved using computer simulation of neuromuscular junctions.

Shirin Movaghgharnezhad, an assistant research professor, led an activity where students could activate and record muscle movement on each other.

Doctoral student Erica King led an activity that involved using ultrasound and force plate technology to visualize muscles in the body.

Master's student Gavin Smiga leads virtual reality activity. Photo by Eduardo Macedo/Office of University Branding

Research Assistant Professor Samuel Acuna and Professor Siddhartha Sikdar led another activity in the Center for Adaptive Systems of Brain-Body Interactions (CASBBI). In addition to introducing the students to methods that measure brain rhythms, the pair demonstrated and had the students interact with a former undergraduate team’s senior design project, a virtual reality system for physical therapy.

By participating in the BioE-Buzz Summer Camp at George Mason, campers not only improved their understanding of bioengineering and their familiarity with George Mason but also developed critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

An exceptional opportunity for high school juniors and seniors to immerse themselves in the world of bioengineering, the BioE Buzz Summer Camp is planned to recur in summer 2025.

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Pitch Perfect: Entrepreneur hopes to change lives and inspire others

Colleen Rich — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:15:51 +0000

Pitch Perfect: Entrepreneur hopes to change lives and inspire others Colleen Rich Wed, 03/13/2024 - 10:15

When Shrishti Singh came to ��AV for her doctoral studies, she had a goal in mind: developing a new technology that would allow the visualization of cancer in deep tissue and perhaps enable earlier diagnoses.

Using a combination of FDA-approved dyes for photoacoustic imaging, Singh created an injectable contrast agent that attaches to tumor cells and increases the visibility of those cells against the background tissue.

Singh completed her PhD in bioengineering in 2022, but her relationship with the university continues. During her time at Mason, Singh has used all the tools the university provides to bring her discovery to the marketplace.

In April 2023, Singh was on one of the 15 teams that competed for $40,000 in prizes at the Costello College of Business annual Patriot Pitch Competition. She took home first place and the Mason’s Choice Award in the competition’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) track.

In November 2023, Singh was at Mason Square pitching her technology at Mason’s annual Accelerate Investor Conference, which attracts more than 400 entrepreneurs, investors, students, and members of the Washington, D.C., entrepreneurial ecosystem. She was awarded $2,000 for her efforts.

“I'm a researcher by training. I've been trained to present at scientific conferences so talking in front of an audience was not difficult for me,” said Singh. “The difficult part was assimilating all of the business information that I've learned so far into a presentation or a slide deck, and to be able to present that in a time-constrained environment.”

Singh, now a postdoctoral fellow at Mason, has cofounded a company, NIRView Biosciences, with her bioengineering faculty mentors Remi Veneziano and Parag Chitnis, and Singh and NIRView Biosciences have been designated a 2023 Virginia Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Success Story.

“As we develop the company, [Veneziano and Chitnis] are involved in creating strategy and vision of the company, along with helping me write grants and obtain funding,” she said. “They provide me with mentorship on the technology front to be able to take this company forward.”

Singh and her cofounders were a few of 30,000 entrepreneurs who participated in a Virginia SBDC workshop, seminar, or training in 2023. Through its 16 programs, the Virginia SBDC, which is part of Mason Enterprise, helped 10,000 businesses, provided 40,000 hours of one-on-one counseling, offered 1,600 training programs, and incubated more than 550 companies with an impact of $3.36 billion. Of the businesses served, 61% were woman-owned, 46% were minority-owned, and 15% were veteran-owned.

Mason researcher Remi Veneziano, Shrishti Singh, and Parag Chitnis cofounded NIRView Biosciences. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

“The SBDC has been one of our biggest supporters,” Singh said. “I work extensively with my SBDC mentor, Elizabeth Pyle, who is always ready to be to give us advice on how to take the business forward.”

Singh and Veneziano participated in SBDC’s Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP), a no-cost incubator that helps technology start-ups from ideation to initial funding and beyond. They worked with ICAP’s life science business mentors over the course of a year to position their technology for successful commercialization, and in 2023 they were accepted into the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which provides financial support and experiential education to help university researchers commercialize scientific discoveries.

“The support of SBDC has been tremendous,” said Singh, who also has a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and an engineering degree from Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India. “My training has been on the scientific front, so SBDC helped me learn different aspects of the lean business model canvas, customer discovery, and product-market fit, which was a new learning curve for me.”

Singh said while she chose Mason originally for its diversity, it is the people and community here that have made a difference in her life. “I have made friends, and I have gained mentors that are still an active part of my professional life,” she said. “I have been able to take this education and put it toward a better professional vision that I've always wanted. I can say Mason is the reason I have been able to accomplish a lot of my dreams.”

Costello College's Patriot Pitch Competition supports idea and early-stage business ventures and is open to current Mason students and recent alumni from all majors/fields of study.

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At Fuse topping out ceremony, student researchers showcase their novel prosthetic liner

Sarah Holland — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 20:25:07 +0000

At Fuse topping out ceremony, student researchers showcase their novel prosthetic liner Sarah Holland Wed, 02/14/2024 - 15:25

As a capstone to the bioengineering program at ��AV, senior students complete a team-based, two-semester design project developing solutions to real-world biomedical and/or clinical problems.

At the topping off ceremony for Fuse at Mason Square, Mason bioengineering majors Alessandra B Coogan, Katie A Harrison, Karmel Webster, Rachel A Ometz, and Sujung Rodriguez presented their group’s project on a novel prosthetic sleeve.

Tell us about your project.

Prosthetic liners are integral in ensuring a socket fits properly and comfortably. But due to the nature of their design, prosthetic users face the challenge of heat and moisture accumulation around the residual limb. On a hot August day, a simple walk to the mailbox can generate such a significant amount of sweat that bacterial infections, blisters, and swelling can develop. Despite the plethora of solutions saturating the market, the problem endures, propelling our team to confront this issue with a user-centered perspective.

What inspired you to select this topic?

Our motivation to take on this challenge springs from a profound belief that prosthetics should transcend mere functionality; they should empower, not limit. Furthermore, this undertaking allows for the blend of diverse disciplines, ranging from material science to computational modeling. Moreover, dedicating our senior year to this cause provides us with the unique opportunity to give back to the communities around us and raise awareness about the challenges faced by individuals with amputations.

What has been your greatest success thus far?

Our greatest success is the number of people we've met who are willing and eager to help us with our project. We think that speaks to the greater collaborative nature of science and innovation, embodying Mason's mission: innovation is our tradition.

What is one thing you’ve learned while working on this project that will be useful to you in the field?

How iterative the design process is. Each iteration of brainstorming, prototyping, and refinement may seem like setbacks at first, but in reality are new avenues we can approach from a different, more educated perspective. On top of this, feedback is critical. The relationship between iteration and feedback has been instrumental in propelling our project forward. It underscores the importance of adaptability and the continuous quest for improvement.

How would dedicated research space, such as the plans for Fuse at Mason Square, help sustain your project?

Fuse would offer us the opportunity to connect with individuals from myriad backgrounds and experiences. In such a richly diverse environment, the ability to garner insights from individuals beyond the confines of our field or even engineering becomes a potent catalyst for innovation. Fuse becomes not just a physical space but an incubator for cross-disciplinary dialogue and ideation for anyone.

From left, Rachel A Ometz, Katie A Harrison, Alessandra B Coogan, and Sujung Rodriguez pose with a prototype of their prosthetic sleeve. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

Karmel Webster, a member of the prosthetic liner team who was unable to attend the demonstration. Photo provided.

Read about the recent celebration at Fuse at Mason Square

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At Fuse topping out ceremony, student researchers demonstrate the power of VR in physical rehabilitation

Sarah Holland — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:54:47 +0000

At Fuse topping out ceremony, student researchers demonstrate the power of VR in physical rehabilitation Sarah Holland Wed, 02/14/2024 - 14:54

As a capstone to the bioengineering program at ��AV, senior students complete a team-based, two-semester design project developing solutions to real-world biomedical and/or clinical problems.

At the topping off ceremony for Fuse at Mason Square, Rebecca Schuetz, Gavin Smiga, Lana Hashem, Kirubel Tadesse, and Rasil Alamri presented their group’s project on a virtual reality-based physical rehabilitation system.

Tell us about your project.

Many people around the world need lower limb rehabilitation to regain function, including more than 101 million stroke patients and many athletic injury patients. Despite the vast number of people needing rehabilitation, only 36% of these patients complete their plans of care and achieve maximum results. Virtual reality has proven to be more effective at improving gait and balance in stroke and rehabilitation patients when compared to traditional therapy. VR also is considered to be more exciting and engaging for patients. While some virtual reality rehabilitation tools currently exist, they are often inaccessible due to size, cost, and complexity. Therefore, our goal is to create a portable, inexpensive, and engaging virtual reality lower-limb rehabilitation platform that can be set up in a range of locations and used by patients in their own homes to regain mobility, muscular strength, and balance.

What inspired you to select this topic?

As a team, we talked about our interests, strengths and weaknesses, and passions, and settled on this project. We all had a strong background in coding, and we loved the idea of using code and virtual reality in a way that would improve patient outcomes. Through our interviews with rehabilitation patients and physical therapists, we were inspired by the need to make rehabilitation more engaging.

What has been your greatest success thus far?

Our greatest success so far has been leveraging clinical information to engineer critical aspects of our virtual reality rehabilitation platform. Through interviews with a diverse group, including physical therapists and patients undergoing physical therapy for lower limb rehabilitation, we gathered invaluable insights. The information encompasses aspects such as initial patient assessments, patient monitoring metrics, exercise efficacy, range of motion requirements, patient engagement strategies, and challenges faced in physical therapy. Armed with this comprehensive data, we enhanced the design of virtual environments and refined the overall design, marking a pivotal success in our project.

What is one thing you’ve learned while working on this project that will be useful to you in the field?

One significant takeaway from working on this project is the importance of brainstorming and prototyping. We started with five different designs and continued to test to narrow down our options to one design that met all our requirements. In addition, we valued feedback from experts who have used this technology as it helps us understand the strengths and weaknesses that we should address in our project. This will be very useful in the bioengineering field since it requires lots of testing and prototyping to ensure that our product meets the specific user needs of our stakeholders.

How would dedicated research space, such as the plans for Fuse at Mason Square, help sustain your project?

Finding a space large enough to base our project and one that was secure and quiet enough to allow for an optimal development environment was one of our great challenges. We have repurposed a room that was intended for storage space. A dedicated research space would equip us with all the tools we truly need to have a successful final design, as well as a testing space. With Fuse at Mason Square in particular, the fact that it has been purpose-built for research and will provide a space for all departments to come together is very exciting. For instance, once we have developed our device, we could collaborate with kinesiology or Psychology Department researchers to conduct studies where we test the viability of our product and improve it further. Then, we could collaborate with the Costello College of Business on the possibility of bringing our product to market.

The capstone group poses with their project designs. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

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Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water

Teresa Donnellan — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 19:03:14 +0000

Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water Teresa Donnellan Thu, 01/25/2024 - 14:03

The most elegant solutions are sometimes the simplest, like using one waste product to eliminate another. By combining spent coffee grounds with iron oxide (aka rust), Mason engineers have created CoffeeBots, which can bind to several different pollutants in seawater before being removed via magnets.

From left to right: Jeff Moran, Amit Kumar Singh, and Tarini Basireddy pose with CoffeeBot samples.
Photo by Teresa Donnellan.

High school lab assistant Tarini Basireddy, post-doc Amit Kumar Singh, and assistant professor Jeff Moran recently published their findings in Nanoscale demonstrating how their invention, which they call “CoffeeBots,” can effectively remove three types of pollutants from seawater: oil, microplastics, and methylene blue.

Singh proposed creating CoffeeBots as a way for Basireddy to gain hands-on experience without having to interact with the many dangerous chemicals in Moran’s laboratory, which focuses mainly on developing artificial, self-propelled microparticles for different medical and environmental applications.

“Tarini and Amit developed a simple strategy to coat spent coffee grounds, which I brought from home after brewing my morning coffee, with iron oxide nanoparticles,” said Moran.

Coffee grounds have a porous, irregular surface, so they have ample surface area to which pollutants can bind, even with much smaller iron oxide nanoparticles attached, he explained. Moreover, because iron oxide is magnetic, a simple handheld magnet can both drive CoffeeBots through polluted water and remove them once they have absorbed the pollutants. Basireddy used Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy to confirm that the iron oxide nanoparticles had bonded to the coffee grounds.

“Tarini’s extensive research experience and skillset were crucial to the success of this project," Moran noted. She’s way ahead of where I was at her age.”

While using coffee grounds to clean up oil spills is not entirely new, this team is the first to show that moving CoffeeBots outperform stationary ones at removing pollutants, since moving CoffeeBots encounter pollutant molecules more often than stationary coffee grounds do. Making the coffee grounds magnetic has another benefit: Once the CoffeeBots are recovered, they can be reused several times with little loss in water-cleaning efficacy.

Methylene blue

The team demonstrates that
CoffeeBots are drawn to magnets.
Photo by Teresa Donnellan.

The team assessed how CoffeeBots fare in seawater polluted with methylene blue, a dye commonly used in textile production. In addition to being a carcinogen, Basireddy explained, methylene blue can cause serious health problems: “It can cause skin irritation, if there's too much in the water; it can cause a lot of digestive problems; it can cause nausea, fever, lots of symptoms.” She added that it can negatively impact marine life as well.

The team found CoffeeBots can be an effective solution for cleaning methylene blue from seawater, especially when they are first also loaded with ascorbic acid, which helps break down the dye and render it nontoxic. Basireddy noted the potential simplicity of a CoffeeBots-based solution to methylene blue pollution, saying, “It's cool because the countries that are big textile producers also happen to be the countries that are big in coffee production.” The team cited Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam as countries that produce both dyed textiles and coffee and struggle with water pollution.

Oil and microplastics

The final pollutant tested is perhaps the most exciting, as it’s been a burgeoning topic of concern in recent years: microplastics. In water, microplastics cling to coffee grounds for the same reason that oil does: each substance is hydrophobic.

“One reason why microplastics and nanoplastics are such a tricky environmental problem is that they're so small, and that makes it difficult to locate them just to remove them,” said Moran. “By driving the CoffeeBots through the water, the hydrophobic interactions cause the microplastic particles to build up and accumulate on the surface of the coffee grounds.”

Singh noted that, while other (perhaps more expensive) techniques exist for remediating oil spills and removing chemical pollutants from water, developing a technique to make microplastic removal more efficient is an exciting new development.

Further plans

The team has applied for a patent to protect the technology and are excited to determine the full capabilities of CoffeeBots. They are optimistic because CoffeeBots are potentially a simple, inexpensive solution to water pollution.

While Basireddy has moved on to her freshman year at Johns Hopkins University, Singh and Moran look forward to finding further applications for CoffeeBots and possibly improving their technology. For example, Singh hopes to find a way to make CoffeeBots move when activated by sunlight, which would enable them to propel themselves through the water without the need for an external magnet. In addition, the team plans to explore the full range of pollutants that can be removed by CoffeeBots and characterize the efficacy of different coffee types.

Get a more detailed look at the team's experiments by reading their paper in Nanoscale, “Eliminating waste with waste: transforming spent coffee grounds into microrobots for water treatment,” which includes several videos of CoffeeBots in action, such as the one below. In addition, Singh created a video to promote CoffeeBots on YouTube.

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Jeffrey Moran

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A cancer diagnosis helped this Mason grad find her career path

Damian Cristodero — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 18:27:18 +0000

A cancer diagnosis helped this Mason grad find her career path Damian Cristodero Fri, 12/08/2023 - 13:27

Dulcce Valenzuela wasn’t going to say she would want to go through it again. But of her diagnosis, fight, and success beating back cancer as a teenager, she said, “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

That’s because the ��AV senior, who will graduate this month with a bioengineering degree, used the episode as a foundation for her life’s purpose.

“How can I help other people?” she said. “How can I leverage my skills to help somebody else?”

For Valenzuela, 30, from Stafford, Virginia, and a transfer student from Germanna Community College, that means medical school, a career in aerospace medicine, perhaps in the Air Force, and building off her research in Mason’s Applied Biosensing Laboratory.

There, under the mentorship of associate professor Parag Chitnis, Valenzuela is part of an effort to develop wearable ultrasound technology for the quantitative assessment of musculoskeletal injuries in military service members.

At the same time, Valenzuela is working part-time for Inova Health System as a rehabilitation technician. She previously worked part-time for Mary Washington Healthcare as a patient safety attendant.

"Dulcce is an exemplar student who not only achieved high academic standing in our classes but also made the most of the diverse research opportunities Mason Bioengineering has to offer for our undergrads," Chitnis said. "In my lab, she independently developed a method for characterizing the performance of novel, wearable ultrasound sensors, which has now become part of our standard protocol. This was an impressive accomplishment considering that she had no prior experience in this area."

“Once you’re out of the waters with something like cancer, your body is very much in fight or flight mode, and you’re just kind of surviving for a little bit,” said Valenzuela, who underwent two years of treatment to overcome Ewing sarcoma, which began in the soft tissue and bones of her shoulder and spread to her lungs. “Now I’m doing things with intention.”

It is that grit—including coming to the United States at 13 with her mother and sister from their native Honduras for her cancer treatments—that defines Valenzuela as a Mason student, said Shani Ross, associate chair of undergraduate programs in the Bioengineering Department.

“She is a good citizen of Mason,” Ross said. “From a diverse background, a transfer student, a good human being. And through her own struggles, really wants to help people.”

Added Claudia Borke, an academic advisor in the Bioengineering Department: “She exemplifies the best in a Mason student.”

Valenzuela said Mason helped pull the best out of her.

She said she immediately felt at home at the university during a field trip to the Fairfax Campus with other Germanna students. She appreciates the university’s diversity and the “tons of opportunities” for research with faculty who are “very open to having students in their labs so we can get some experience.”

“I feel I’m coming out with good relationships, good connections,” Valenzuela said. “I feel pretty ready to take my next steps.”

That includes beginning an accelerated master’s program at Mason in Spring 2024, continuing her research in the Applied Biosensing Lab, studying for the MCAT, and eventually applying to medical schools.

“I’m so excited,” Valenzuela said about graduating. “It is such an accomplishment to do that and give that to my mom and let her enjoy that, too.”

Learn more about the 2023 Winter Commencement Ceremonies

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Parag Chitnis

Shani Ross

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May 21, 2024
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May 17, 2024
This Senior of the Year found ‘true community’ at George Mason
May 9, 2024

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Meet Quentin Sanders: An Expert in Exoskeletons and Prosthetics

Pam Shepherd — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 20:46:02 +0000

Meet Quentin Sanders: An Expert in Exoskeletons and Prosthetics Pam Shepherd Fri, 08/25/2023 - 16:46

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Quentin Sanders

We had a conversation with one of Mason’s newest faculty, Quentin Sanders, who holds a joint appointment in the Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering Departments where he is on the forefront of exoskeleton and prosthetic research and development. In this video, Sanders describes his work, his inspiration, and how he sees his research impacting the future.

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