PolyBioTech

Could robots take over laboratories in the future? Check out my final project discussing automation in science: automatingscience.looman.ca @PolyBioTech

I had the privilege of talking to @ProfMayGriffith about her incredible research on LiQD cornea, a corneal regeneration technology! 👁️💉Here's my trailer that highlights the uniqueness of this innovation! Full video on: gbm6330.edublogs.org/?p=6919&previe… #RegenerativeMedicine #GBM6330

My final project is on! This is my first time editing audio to create a nice podcast. It's super challenging to combine ongoing sentences smoothly—kudos, again, to all the editors out there! Let me know your thoughts! youtu.be/dI-NJ558Yag

Tracheal intubation in microgravity: Here's the trailer for my final case study with @PolyBioTech! I interviewed Dr. @SeamusThierry on space medicine & autonomous decision-making for #Mars expeditions🚀 #SpaceMedicine #Microgravity #SpaceTech

it’s raining projects this week! here is a new one for you. how do you think we can improve brain segmentation to improve diagnosis and direct towards patient specific treatment? you might find your answer here, I hope you’ll enjoy link: drive.google.com/file/d/1eXm8H4…

🎧 Check out Episode 2 of the Emerging Biomedical Technologies podcast! 🎙️✨ Join @ThomasDagonneau and me as we dive into @DrKenWeber's work on muscle MRI and the Muscle Map Toolbox 🛠️. Don’t miss the full interview in the next episode! 👉 open.spotify.com/episode/7vYGS9…

Final project is ready to be consumed! Huge thanks to Dr. Delphine Périé-Curnier for the amazing talk! It was over 40min long talk and I edit it to 10min keeping the crunchier parts. Be ready, it will be out tomorrow at noon (EST) Hope you like it!

Final project season is here! 🎉 Here's a sneak peek at mine. Only true @PolyBioTech students will recognize the meaning behind every one of these images. 😉 Huge thanks to @Stikov, @cboudoux, and @houmansaboji for inspiring us with groundbreaking #biomedical technologies! 🙌

Here's the intro of my new case study! It will explores the essential biotech innovations we must master before embarking on a long-duration mission to Mars #SpaceMedicine @PolyBioTech

MY TEACHING STATEMENT (WRITTEN 10 YEARS AGO) Looking back on the classes I have taken, even my favorite ones, I am saddened by how little of them I remember. Most of the facts are gone. The only reproducible knowledge is an anecdote or two, several trivia, and an assurance that I know where to look when I need to revisit that material. However, what sets apart the best taught classes is that I came away from them with more than mere reproducible facts. Those classes helped me internalize a way of thinking that proves useful long after the course facts have evaporated. This holds equally true for the great engineering as well as for the great humanities classes. The thinking and problem-solving skills acquired in one field or problem area can be applied to many others as long as the teacher makes sure to emphasize the portability and universality of the foundations of human knowledge. During my studies at Stanford University, I taught ten different courses ranging from introductory programming to graduate courses on communication and optimization. The class size varied from ten to a hundred, the classroom moved from California to Japan and back, my roles changed from teaching assistant through TA coordinator to instructor. Yet I stuck to some core beliefs and principles that have made me a better teacher and guided me to the Stanford Centennial Teaching Assistant Award in 2008. The roots of my teaching philosophy reach back to my first TA training session, when the coordinator said that I should prepare for a lecture as if my IQ will drop by half the moment I face the classroom. This sentence made such an impact, that two years later, when I inherited his job, it was the first thing I told the new TAs. It keeps coming back to haunt me every time my vanity or my laziness get the best of me. In the years since, I have learned that the only way to make up for this apparent IQ drop is to know exactly what to say and how to present the first five minutes in front of an audience. Dry runs are only a part of it. The larger part is putting the presentation in context, and framing the beginning in a way that makes the remaining 40-odd minutes less of a chore, and more of a chorus, rephrasing and repeating the take-home point as often as possible. Every time I get a chance to teach, I ask myself what is the single thing I want my audience to remember at the end of the day. Then I try to summarize it in one paragraph or catch phrase, so that they hold on to it while thousands of other words drift by. The more universal the summary, the more applicable it will be to everybody present. The more striking the words or images in it, the more likely it is that they will get stuck in memory an hour later. The more connections I make to the summary during the course of the lecture, the easier it is to see the importance of the concept and its place in the vast body of science. Once the goal of the lecture is clear, I try to engage the audience with questions, some with a clear answer that could be shouted from the back row (not that people in the back row ever shout answers), some so open-ended that even I do not know the answer. I spend most of my preparation for lecture coming up with those questions, and finding ways to field them as if they are a natural extension of the lecture. By varying the type of questions, I strive to appeal to different personalities in the audience, yielding my soapbox to those that have no trouble responding in public, but also teasing those who will never bother to raise their hand. While this type of lecturing is not guaranteed to be interactive, the goal is not to get everybody talking as much as to get everybody thinking. Using some of those same questions in assignments further drives the points home, and makes problem sets and exams an effective teaching and thinking tool. I have been fortunate to learn from some amazing teachers, who incorporate many of the tactics outlined above. Without exception, the best teachers have also been the clearest about their expectations from the students. Grading is never perfectly objective, yet publishing clear grading criteria and creating unambiguous assignments is the best way to prevent headaches after the grades are in. This only proves the importance of thinking about the right question to ask, be it during lecture or during the evaluation process. Yet all the approaches mentioned above are worth nothing without an appropriate attitude. While I do not believe that teachers should be friends with their students, a certain level of familiarity will help the students identify with the instructor and the subject matter. There are several ways of establishing such a relationship, ranging from learning students’ names early, to asking for feedback or adjusting the office hours to accommodate the students’ schedule. I have spent numerous hours mentoring students and training teaching assistants, both as a teacher and as the Stanford Electrical Engineering graduate student advisor, and I know that the biggest life lessons do not come from getting the right answers on a problem set, but from understanding the principles of problem solving. The first president of Stanford University, an ichthyologist named David Starr Jordan, said that every time he learned a student’s name, he forgot the name of another fish. I have learned many students’ names, and as a consequence I have forgotten many things I was taught throughout the years. Yet, some truths keep swimming around in my memory, refusing to be forgotten and resurfacing in most unexpected times and places. Whenever they brush against my consciousness, I reflect back on who put them there, and my appreciation of that person increases. I would be happiest if ten years from now I run into a former student of mine, and I instantly recall their name while they fish out a nugget of wisdom I planted in them. That alone would be worth a lifetime of teaching.

Evelyn’s twitter ➡️ @dreamyweather !

Last year, guest speaker Evelyn Mclean shared her paper on amateur science. Over the year, we (@janeabdoo @Stikov @BlosteinNadia ) collaborated to refine it! Today, we’re excited to discuss the final interactive article!! ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Just rewatched @alex_or_sashka ’s amazing video on the blood-brain barrier on a chip! 🧠💡 It’s even better the second time! 🤩Incredible work on how this innovative model could transform neuroscience. #BloodBrainBarrier #OrgansOnChips @PolyBioTech gbm6330.edublogs.org/2024/11/15/blo…

Big fan of clear, hand-drawn videos like this! @AnaxorSwonk explains how researchers test treatments on tumors. Favorite part: watching a bad cell lose its aggressiveness in space... and boom💥 More here: gbm6330.edublogs.org/2024/11/15/gli… Study by @giulia_silvani #Bioprinting

Shorten version of my case study on Dynamic Interface Printing (#DIP). This new tech is just awesome 🔥 Thanks to @HoumanSavoji and @Stikov who gave me the chance to discover bioprinting ! Paper by @callum_vidler @mhalwes @UniMelb #bioprinting #3dprinting #biotech

Just presented it in my #GBM3660 course with @PolyBioTech and @Stikov. Check out my blog post: 👇 gbm6330.edublogs.org/2024/11/15/3d-…

Such an amazing afternoon of presentations @PolyBioTech 🧬 I don’t have a top three this week, I have a top eleven! Congrats to everyone who presented and don’t forget to go see our work: gbm6330.edublogs.org/category/tissu… #TissueEngineering #OrganOnAChip

I'm too hungry for my stupid brain not to imagine this every time hear I "organ-on-a-chip"

@JoSteenhouwer wonderful video! thank you for the good work !!

Good afternoon X! Is the last case study @PolyBioTech class. Today it is about 3D Bioprinting, so here is my video about the work of Feifei Zhou and Al. - Rapid printing of bio-inspired 3D tissue constructs for skin regeneration. doi.org/10.1016/j.biom… youtu.be/3WybtI5amRg