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Engineering Her Future
In her quest to make a difference, one UGA engineering graduate student finds an interdisciplinary environment that complements the demands of leading-edge biomedical research
By Alan Flurry
Tina Talwar began graduate school at UGA with some big goals in mind. “When I first came here, I was looking at a very global focus for my research, things like curing cancer,” Talwar recalls. As part of her bachelor’s degree in instrumentation engineering in India, an introductory course in biomedicine piqued her interest as an appealing way to combine engineering technology and medicine. Her learning experience as a UGA engineer began with the narrowing down of her enthusiasm from that global interest to a more manageable – and effective – dimension.
“We were looking at polymers, and that’s when the idea gradually came along,” recalls Tina Talwar, bioengineering graduate student at UGA, of her experience working on the development of long-term glucose sensors. Glucose sensors function in the body of diabetics to measure blood sugar levels and regulate insulin dosages; the short life of such a sensor, typically three to five months, requires their traumatic replacement in the body at least twice per year.
Biocompatible polymers have long been a part of implants in the body – like pacemakers and defibrillators – to lengthen their durability. “For all foreign objects in the body, cells and protein immediately begin to attach to, clog and debilitate the device,” Talwar explains. In the case of glucose sensors, this conventional approach presented the opportunity for modification with new engineering techniques. This along with her influences at UGA, were the key factors that led her in a new direction.
“Dr. Kisaalita helped me understand that refining your ideas is very important for engineers, even before any calculations, and I can see now that that probably goes for everything,” Tina says of William Kisaalita, coordinator for UGA Engineering graduate programs and a leading researcher in the development of cell-based assay technologies. His work, funded by several federal agencies and the UGA Research Foundation, has wide implications for accelerated drug discovery, especially for neurodegenerative diseases. Working with Kisaalita, Tina was exposed to the rigor and professionalism of his research methods even while he stressed the importance of narrowing the scope of her project.
“I have been very impressed by Tina’s hard work and dedication,” Kisaalita says of Talwar, quick to note her diversity of interests and what her presence adds to the graduate engineering program. “She jumped right in and it is paying off for her in a big way that makes me excited about her future,” he says.
Under Kisaalita’s tutelage, Tina began to experiment with different polymers but he also encouraged her to take advantage of other possibilities within the ever-expanding aegis of UGA engineering. To the polymers, Talwar added the innovative step of attaching microstructures to the sensor, a portion of the work that required the micro-nano fabrication lab. Now she had a novel strategy to discourage cells from attaching to the sensor – the polymer-coated microstructure to impede cell and protein absorption on the sensor.
This vital “channelizing” of her thoughts, as she puts it – from how to think through one simple problem to imagining the possibilities in play as part of a larger biological process – allowed Tina to access some of the crucial links on the UGA campus and highlights the engineering experience at UGA. Fabrication of the nanostructures took place in the micro-nano lab of engineering professor Guigen Zhang; methods for the blood analysis she learned just down the street from engineering at the School of Veterinary Medicine; the pig blood on which the tests were performed came from the UGA swine farm; and the chemistry between the polymers (polyurethane and heprin eventually proved best) was performed by Tina as a guest of Dr. Yan Geng’s lab in the UGA Chemistry department. “Every aspect of this work is doable, if you can capture the right skill set necessary for each step,” she says. No single expertise in any of these areas would guarantee a result like hers, yet the open cooperation across disciplines served to open up the range of new solutions.
Now Talwar has become an expert on both polymers and microstructures – and she can talk like one. But on her experience at UGA, she becomes more reflective, her efforts here wrapped in pride and happiness at her sense of accomplishment. “I have been here against all odds, and the experience I’ve gained in who I have become makes it all worth it,” Tina says. That experience includes her husband, Sameer, and five-year-old twin girls, Aarushi and Shreeya, sharply raising her sense of accomplishment of taking a graduate degree as a full-time wife and mother. But maybe in Tina’s ambitions toward making a difference, learning how to fuse her engineering knowledge with interest in the body, perhaps this was just what she imagined.
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