Found a lab from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign that's willing to let me carry out my experiment (shoutout to Dr. Amy Wagoner Johnson and Dr. Joaquin Yus for making this happen!)
Future plan: if I don't get this grant (the results would come by mid-February), I'll be applying to other grants.
My new Focus 🤖
In my last newsletter, I announced that I'll be jumping deep into the synthetic biology field. Well, I changed my mind a bit and decided to dive into Machine Learning instead because I wanted to do a project that (1) doesn't involve the delay of a lab work, (2) isn't that similar to my previous tissue engineering project, and (3) is widely applicable for a variety of other fields.
My goal for this focus is to build the depth of knowledge to be able to contribute to a company or do ML research. Currently, I'm introducing myself to ML by replicating basic image classification algorithms using PyTorch.
Future plan:In February, I'll be diving deep into another subfield of ML, like Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).
Bioprinter 🧪
I've been working on building a 3D bioprinter from scratch over the last couple of months, and just last week, it finally moved!
To test out the extruder, I got my printer to retract and extrude water! Here's a 10 sec video clip of this.
Future plan: I'll be making the alginate support bath and gelatin bioink for printing real hydrogel with this printer.
If you know of research grants that a high schooler could potentially apply to, I'd love to learn more!
If you work in media or run a podcast, please contact me!
If you are running an event and know of a speaking opportunity for me to share my experience, please reach out!
If you know of a tissue engineering/synthetic biology lab that's open to having a high school researcher over the summer, please contact me! (see my portfolio here)
