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Mentor: Dr. Elena Aikawa

I’m a Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Cardiovascular Sciences in the Cardiovascular Division of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
I graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a major in Biomedical Engineering. Next, I attended Purdue University for my M.S. in Biomedical Engineering, where I studied articular cartilage regeneration. I completed my PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2018. At ND, I taught and assisted with Fluid Mechanics, Solid Mechanics, and Thermodynamics. There, I was also a graduate student union chair and served as the director of the Expanding Your Horizons Program. My research focused on the relationship between abnormalities in blood flow and heart disease. More specifically, I was interested in how hemodynamic alterations resulting from a bicuspid aortic valve drove inflammation and remodeling in the aortic valve and ascending aorta.
Under the mentorship of Dr. Elena Aikawa at CICS, I am using ‘omics’ to explore various areas of cardiovascular calcification and stem cell technologies. In particular, we are investigating the crosstalk between exosomes and recipient cells, resolution of calcification through osteoclastogenesis, and induced pluripotent stem cells for drug target discovery.

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