What was your greatest challenge and how did you overcome it?

I would say my greatest difficulty was in bringing together two seemingly disparate lines of work: aerospace control theory and biophysical modeling and control. Being co-advised forced me to be extra creative with bringing together these two world, always reminding me that my time is limited and I can never spread myself too thin because it would immediately show in the quality of my work.

I have learned to make my work application-driven while at the same time taking the methods I develop and framing them as more general solutions that can be applied equally well in aerospace and biomedical applications. This has allowed me to focus on the core problem, while still giving me enough flexibility to tailor the end results to either application, in a way that jives well with whatever audience I am targeting.

This skill will stay with me for the rest of my career, complementing the often discussed skill of communicating research relevance and outcomes to the general public--science communication.

Did you experience any break-through moments in your research?

In the third year of my PhD, I was on the fence about committing to applying my knowledge in aerospace control theory to biomedical applications. As part of my work with Prof. Bentsman, I was already largely invested in applying control theory to study thermal behavior of live tissue in response to radio frequency ablation–a technology that shares many physical similarities with hypersonic flows–but I was never quite certain to what extent and in what way I would want to pursue this work in the future.

In the summer of 2023, I was fortunate to have been accepted for an internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where I worked with the Maritime and Multi-Agent Autonomy group on developing methods for robustly detecting vehicle sensor/actuator malfunction in limited information environments.

I was encouraged by my mentors at JPL to reach out to as many people as possible to expand my horizons, regularly having lunch and coffee breaks with many of my heroes, from people working on Mars rover planning to those working to develop the next generation of Mars helicopters. During these talks, I learned that the Robotics division at JPL had accepted a NASA tech-transfer in the mid-90s to demonstrate their high-accuracy tele-operated manipulation technologies for terrestrial applications.

After talking to one of the lead investigators, Dr. Hari Nayar, whose office was two stories above mine, I spent the better part of an hour hearing all sorts of stories about the RAMS project, or Robot Assisted Microsurgery. After a number of acquisitions and IP transfers in the early 2000s, this technology is now in the hands of Intuitive Surgical, which actively uses the mechanical structure and control approach developed 30 years ago at JPL in a mostly unchanged form to develop its Da Vinci suite of robotic surgery devices that are used all over the world.

What started as a small tech-transfer demonstration of aerospace technologies turned out to be a revolutionary change in the way we approach minimally invasive surgical care today.

After seeing that aerospace technologies can have such a wide-spanning impact beyond my wildest expectations, and being encouraged to take the leap by Dr. Nayar and my mentors, I decided to make this leap of faith, bringing me where I am today, working at one of the foremost research labs that is bringing novel imaging technologies to the operating room, an endeavor that puts an greater demand on the integration between robotics and biological systems than ever before.

What's next in your career?

I’m starting a postdoc at the Beckman Institute in Prof. Stephen Boppart’s group. The project, called MarginDx, is a collaboration between Illinois and Mayo Clinic, funded under the Precision Surgical Interventions grant of the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Health.

Here's a short video describing the project.

The goal is to achieve minimally invasive intraoperative cancer margin detection using two novel imaging techniques: optical coherence tomography and nonlinear optical imaging.

Because cancer detection will be based on microscopic imaging, my role in the project as robo-optics lead is to develop novel safe robotic tools for microscale scanning and segmentation of imaging on live tissue, something that has not been achieved to date. The goal of the project is to develop a commercially viable and FDA-approved medical device in five years.

 What sorts of fun memories do you have of Illinois?

Looking back at my time doing my PhD at Illinois, rather than any big events and international travel--of which there were many--I look back most fondly at connecting with colleagues and chatting on a daily basis. 

I’ve always enjoyed going to Green Street to any one of the cafes with my friends to discuss research, the news, or anything else that is going on in our lives.

Having started my PhD during the height of the pandemic in a time zone 8 hours away from here, I treasure these moments the most.

The PhD process isn’t just a checklist of papers and courses. It’s the individual conversations and connections that make it worthwhile and engaging. The connections that I have made here have enriched my life in ways that I never thought were possible, and I will cherish them into the future.