Aaliyah Gaffey’s career path begins at intersection of engineering and medicine

Aaliyah Gaffey was a senior in high school when COVID interrupted her study abroad year in Italy. She opted to take a gap year before college and used it to develop new skills that led her to realize her career path, blending her passions for aerospace engineering and medicine. Gaffey is now a senior in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“In high school, I saw myself going directly into aerospace engineering,” Gaffey said. “During that gap year, I took patient information for COVID vaccinations at a health clinic and got my EMT certification and license, giving me experience in healthcare. But I also served as a mentor for my high school’s FIRST robotics team, which gave me continuous exposure to engineering. I fell in love with both fields and wanted to combine them.”

Gaffey said she saw an overlap. She believes as medicine becomes more quantitative, there will be a bigger push for more engineers to go into healthcare and noted the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that set the bar as the first engineering-based medical college. Gaffey sees that as the perfect balance of her passions.

“My goal is to get an M.D. Ph.D.,” she said. “My dream job would be to be an astronaut, but I think as a flight surgeon I’d be just as happy.”

She’s already passed the squeamish test, having observed surgery up close while shadowing at the CGH Medical Center in her hometown of Sterling, Illinois and from her hands-on experience as an EMT with the local ambulance service.

“I liked the fast-paced environment and critical thinking required and being able to walk into a house and see a medical problem, then within a minute plan how to treat and stabilize the patient.”

Gaffey recalled how her first trauma call helped her begin to see overlaps between medicine and engineering.

“I had a patient who was doing construction and fell over 20 feet onto cement. Nothing prepares you to see something like that. It reinforced my desire to work in emergency medicine, but it also made me think about how engineering knowledge comes in handy when dealing with medical cases. I thought about things like the velocity of the fall, the force hitting the ground, and how a bone is most likely to break at a 45-degree angle due to shear force being at its maximum—a concept AE 321 discusses in regard to Mohr’s circle. It was interesting to infuse engineering concepts into the medical environment. That was one case where I saw it play out in front of me.”

Since then, Gaffey has continued to find herself at the intersection of engineering and medicine. On a co-op at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, she worked on a human exploration rover challenge. In an internship at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Gaffey created test procedures for thermal vacuum chamber testing of the xEMU spacesuit and assisted with space suit tests at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

At yet another internship, this time at SpaceX on its space medicine team, she developed the medical subsystems like the equipment, the task, and treatable medical conditions on future lunar missions that use engineering principles to guide medical device selection.

Gaffey’s mentor at SpaceX challenged her to look at a medical case, then think about the physics behind it. “For example, something like IV tubing. In space, you’d have to hang it six times as high to combat lunar gravity. I’d never thought of that until I did the internship.”

She has already been invited to return to SpaceX as an intern this coming summer.

At U. of I., Gaffey worked on a research project at the Beckman Institute with Marni Boppart in the College of Applied Health Sciences on extracellular vesicles which are believed to combat muscle loss. For Gaffey, the work relates to astronaut fitness in space.

But she’s also done research with aerospace engineer Melkior Ornik on robotics along with his recent Ph.D. graduate Hamza El-Kebir. This collaboration resulted in a side gig. She and El-Kebir founded a company called Calisone to develop a new medical device. They entered last year’s Cozad Challenge. Their patent application was selected to be fully funded by the University of Illinois College of Law.

“Hamza and I are both interested in surgery to remove cancer and being able to fully detect all the cancer margins. Most diagnostic devices like an MRI or a CT are huge. We are developing a small, portable, non-invasive device that uses near infrared light to look at vascularization. Cancer requires greater blood flow, so there is greater vascularization near cancerous regions. We’re combining that with observing a thermal response by elevating subsurface temperatures, because there is literature showing that cancer reacts to heat differently than non-cancerous regions.”

After her summer at SpaceX, Gaffey will return to Illinois for a fifth year to complete her B.S., then take another gap year. She plans to spend the time studying for the seven-hour long medical school entrance exam and checking all the boxes for the med school application such as volunteering, research, and clinical hours, then sending out applications to begin her M.D. Ph.D. the following fall.

About the varied opportunities and scholarships she’s received while at Illinois such as one from the Aerospace Medicine Association and another from the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, Gaffey repeatedly says she’s grateful.

“I remember seeing the email notification that I’d received the Scott R. White Scholarship. I was shocked. I'm honored to have been awarded this one in particular because it is based on my research. Also, the scholarship amount really helped lighten my financial burden. I did EMT work to help pay for rent, gas, food and other essentials. Receiving that money, greatly reduced my financial stress.”

In addition to finding academic balance between engineering and medicine, Gaffey says she’s working on finding more personal balance.

“I’m organized. I use both physical and digital planners—multiple things tracking what I have to do. But the main thing I’ve realized is that I need to better manage my time, so I have more free time to prevent burnout. Despite the time commitments, I could not imagine selecting a better path.”