Capstone provides research experience

On May 3, as the spring semester came to a close, 53 biomedical engineering majors gathered in Joyce Cummings Center to present their capstone projects. Attendees, including members of the external advisory board for the Department of Biomedical Engineering, family and friends of students, faculty, and staff, visited to see the final posters. This year, 15 teams of students partnered with faculty members and local companies to complete their capstone projects. Their work included topics spanning microneedles, cancer screening, reproductive health care, cellular agriculture, and more. 

For participating students, the capstone is final step in their biomedical engineering education at Tufts. It provides an opportunity to consolidate what they’ve learned throughout their undergraduate career and gain hands-on research experience. Based on their skills and interest, each student is matched with a project and a group. “Each project has a very different starting line and mentor,” said Assistant Teaching Professor Angela Lai, who orchestrates the capstone experience. 

Lessons from the lab 

Pulling from the expertise of labs across the Department of Biomedical Engineering and local companies, students spent a portion of their final year at Tufts doing research in a lab. “This was my first independent research project and I learned about overcoming research challenges that you wouldn’t expect,” shared Patrick Solomon. 

Solomon worked with fellow undergraduate students Connor Brala, Harper Meek, and Vicky Yang in Tiampo Family Assistant Professor Srivalleesha Mallidi’s lab. The group focused on refining photoacoustic imaging to make cancer screening more equitable. Clinical trials often lack diversity, and screening tools are not optimized to detect tumors in patients with more melanin in their skin. The group created phantoms – tissue models that can be used to test medical imaging – that could detect tumors in a variety of skin tones. 

As they worked on their project, the group members confronted some of their assumptions about the research process. “You hear that research takes a long time and many attempts and just because you have a procedure doesn’t mean it’s going to work out,” said Meek. Group member Brala echoed the sentiment, saying, “We had plans fail, we had plans go well, but just to be able to adapt to get to our final product was important.” 

Although each project had a specific focus, many students found the experience transferrable to different kinds of research. “This experience helped me get an internship. I was able to talk about the lab experience so it’s applicable to learning and really fulfilling,” said Alexi Judge, who worked with teammates Giang Le and Seungeun Kim with guidance from Dr. Eunseok Gil of 3D-Matrix Medical Technology on developing a wound-healing hydrogel. 

Building career experience

The capstone is more than just an environment for students to learn the ropes of research — it can help transition students to the next phase of their academic or career journeys. “This whole project was unexpected. It opened my mind and showed me how to be more creative going into industry,” shared Tallia Dudley. “It’s not even just in lab skills; we gained a lot of soft skills such as learning how to talk to people at all different levels of understanding about science.”

Biomedical engineering often centers on the human body, but in their project, Dudley, Celia Byrne, Ryanne Barrett, and Derek Hiscox focused on sharks. In collaboration with Frank C. Doble Professor Fio Omenetto and Research Assistant Professor Marco Lo Presti, the group “Team Fish Sticks” identified issues with current shark tagging practices and developed a silk-based adhesive that becomes sticky in contact with water to improve shark conservation efforts. 

While the research work may have been challenging at times, students consistently saw the long-term benefits of the experience. “I found this to be the most rewarding group project I’ve ever done,” said Justin Wang. He collaborated with fellow undergraduates Hamida Giwa, Ravyn Tammiruusu, and Meg Radke in Assistant Professor Nisha Iyer’s lab to develop a neuronal organ-on-a-chip device that could facilitate studying breast cancer innervation. 

As the project evolved, Wang noticed that each group member started to specialize in a certain area of the work. “Beyond growing as an individual, you are able to understand your position collaboratively. That’s going to be something we use in the rest of our careers,” he said. 

The future of BME capstones

Lai joined Tufts in 2023 after spending time as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. This was her first year running the department’s senior capstone program and she hopes to continue strengthening it in the coming years. 

While the teams all made progress, there is always more work to be done on the projects. Lai envisions a system in which the capstones can be continued from year to year. “I hope to have sustained work on the same project over many years with different senior capstone teams, almost like a hereditary project where they can build upon the previous year’s work,” she said.

The students who presented their posters in early May graduated from Tufts just a few weeks later. Some of them plan to remain close and pursue a master’s or PhD program at Tufts, with a number of students pursuing the Fifth-Year Master’s Degree program, while others are entering industry positions. Regardless of their next steps, the students interviewed all agreed that the capstone was a crucial experience for their personal and professional growth.