Video Transcript – Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. Program at Boise State University

Video Transcript

[Derek Nesbitt, Biomedical Engineering Ph.D student]: The biomedical engineering program is a transdisciplinary program that connects engineers, biologists, and kinesiologists from three different colleges. The biomedical engineering program is really research-focused, and this gives students the flexibility to select a track of study that contains courses that really align with their research interests.

[Nick Lehning, Biomedical Engineering Ph.D student]: I’m interested in a degree in biomedical engineering mostly because it allows me to marry my interest in soccer and sport with science. So I’ve always been really interested in the two, but this was a really good way to kind of put them together and be able to actually impact the game from a human perspective and change players’ abilities from a scientific perspective, which I really enjoyed.

[Vahid Malbouby, Biomedical Engineering Ph.D student]: The reason I’m interested in biomedical engineering is, first and foremost, I like helping people and I think biomedical engineering allows me to do so in a meaningful way.

[Danielle Siegel, Biomedical Engineering Ph.D student]: My primary research is to understand how babies achieve a role. We know very little about baby’s motion, especially when they’re developing. So, we want to understand how babies achieve this important developmental milestone, so then we know when something may not be good when they’re developing incorrectly or something may be wrong.

[Michael Okebiorun, Biomedical Engineering Ph.D student]: My research is in using cold atmospheric pressure plasma to remove bacterial biofilms from chronic homes, which surprisingly kills about 100,000 people per year, even in the U.S alone.

[Derek Nesbitt]: My research is on tissues in the knee that get injured, and I’m looking at describing how they fail and what we can do to prevent these failures and hopefully that can keep people mobile and healthy and happy throughout their life.

[Vahid Malbouby]: I work on osteoarthritis which is a joint disease. What I’m trying to do is that I’m trying to bring all the different factors that are involved in this disease into the same model and I’m using computational techniques to work towards a treatment strategy for this disease.

[Nick Lehning]: I’ve really enjoyed how the biomedical engineering program connects biomechanists, engineers, biologists, it’s very cross-discipline and that’s a really cool experience.

[Michael Okebiorun]: Boise State has really helped me to not only develop technical skills like hardware, software development but they’ve also helped me to develop professional skills to be able to launch out into the industry or academia to prove myself as a worthy biomedical engineer.

[Danielle Siegel]: I think Boise State prepares me for my future because we have a lot of opportunities to work with different people outside of Boise State to develop our projects, as well as internally for like teamwork and other real-life job situations that we may be put into.

[Nick Lehning]: I feel like Boise State is preparing me for my future by giving me a lot of hands-on experience, allowing me to work with players face-to-face and putting me in a position where I am developing things for myself. It’s very self-driven. I have great mentors who are guiding me along the way, but they give me the opportunity to sort of explore and push myself to learn things and become a better scientist on my own.