Andrew Hamilton Stark
Author: Andrew Stark | Major: Biomedical Engineering | Semester: Spring 2022
As a recent graduate, reflecting back on my experience in earning my B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, I feel fortunate to have selected the University of Arkansas. I was provided the opportunity to do research in the Translational Biophotonics and Imaging Laboratory under an amazing and inspiring mentor, Dr. Timothy Muldoon. I’ve been involved in this lab since Fall 2020 but my funding term was Spring 2022. This was a wonderful experience and was instrumental in preparing me for my next step – pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. My research focused on trying to create a catheter-scale microendoscope imaging system to be used as a new technique for characterizing tumor microenvironment. This characterization would be done by observing how light is absorbed in tissue to create a 3D representation of an absorber. This topic was suggested by my research mentor, who presented it to me as a code heavy project (which I loved). Dr. Muldoon taught my Biomedical Instrumentation as well as Clinical Observations classes. Halfway through the semester of Biomedical Instrumentation is when the pandemic hit. Despite the pandemic, I knew I still wanted to research so I reached out over the summer and joined the lab.
Dr. Muldoon’s mentoring style allowed me to be a freethinker and problem solver, while providing me with the tools, guidance, support, and feedback needed to succeed. I also had help from a fellow undergraduate in my lab, Zach Neumeier, who was working on the hardware and instrumentation side of the project. Throughout my time in the lab, I would occasionally run into a problem with my code; however, I would remember my mentor’s advice to go back to the last point where the code worked and use that as the starting point. Despite encountering issues along the way with code, I grew to have a great deal of appreciation for the MATLAB programming platform and went more into depth on MATLAB during my research than I did in many of my classes. I also learned a great deal about general lab equipment operation. This research has helped me develop a researcher’s mind, which I know will prepare me for my future academic career. This past fall, Dr. Muldoon afforded me the opportunity of going to BMES 2021 symposium to do a poster presentation of my research to date. Unfortunately, the pandemic was still ongoing so I was unable to make it in person and attended virtually which lended itself to certain disadvantages; however, I gained a lot of knowledge in regards to graduate school, ongoing research in the field, and the general gist of how conferences are structured. I look forward to attending in person conferences during graduate school. Spending 2 years in a Photonics lab heightened my interest for the field. In addition, a genome engineering class was very interesting and has inspired me as well.
As I start my work on my PhD, I will be doing rotations in lab and I can see myself doing research in either one of these fields. I can’t wait to see what the future will bring!