About
Hello!
My name is Amy Shah and I am a biomedical engineering major at the University of California, Irvine. I created this biomedical engineering blog for people who are interested in new medical technologies and treatments. I want to help keep people up-to-date about diverse things in the biomedical field. If you, as a reader, have any suggestions or comments, please contact me and I will be happy to get back to you and/or update my site.
I am currently working on a project in which I create a 3-D tissue engineered construct that mimics the human airway. I use a combination of three different cell types (human umbilical vein endothelial cells, normal human lung fibroblasts, and normal human bronchial epithelial cells), fibrin gels, and transwells to create this. I grow the cells under ideal conditions until they are confluent, then I seed them into an engineered construct that has been designed previously in Dr. Steven George’s lab. I then wait for capillaries to form from the human umbilical vein endothelial cells migrating off of microcarrier beads. Lastly, I scrape the layer of epithelial cells on the transwells so that the tissue engineered construct experiences an induced “asthma attack” and study how to improve the cells’ response to this injury.
Previously, I’ve conducted research in a Developmental and Cell Biology Lab at UCI working with cancer cells and testing different ligands on them to observe their proliferative/apoptotic response. I am very interested in cancer cells, tissue engineering, artificial organs, and stem cell research.
Community outreach and volunteering has always been of great importance to me. I’m currently Secretary and Public Relations Manager of UC Irvine’s Engineering Student Council. This student national student government organization helps spread engineering throughout the community by educating people of the importance and eclectic nature of engineering. We also aid student, faculty, and industrial networking through educational and social experiences.
In the future, I would like to work for a company that has has goals of changing peoples lives for the better. I would like to aid in the creation of tissue engineered substitutes to counteract the shortage of organ donors that exist in the world. To me, biomedical engineering is not the study of medicine and engineering to find temporary cures, but instead it is to find solutions to improve the health and welfare of society.
You can find more information about me and/or connect to me through LinkedIn.
