I-Rop, U-Rop by Bryan

(Pictures coming soon)

One of the Google features I use the most is the Google Alert.

You can set it to email you whenever a certain keyphrase comes up in any of the news sources that Google accesses. So accordingly, I do have an MIT alert. About a month ago, I was chilling in my room reading a book and my nifty-cool-non-default email sound came on, and I immediately grabbed my laptop and saw that I had a new Google alert.

After opening the email, what I began to read about seemed like a very familiar topic. After reading on, I discovered that the article was talking about my UROP. It was awesome. There was a little description about our “Liver-on-a-Chip” project. Our research project is partially funded by the Dupont-MIT Alliance, and Dupont recently donated another $25 million to the alliance.

It was really cool to see our research getting some press attention and to see the work that our team has been putting into the project has been very valuable.

In a nutshell, what our research is trying to accomplish is to design a device allows for high throughput evaluation of drugs under development by simulating a liver through a bioreactor. It’s pretty neat stuff, and the lab is really awesome. There are people from all disciplines working there which contributes to a greater understanding of the issues facing the device. I’ve actually nicknamed the device “Moo-Moo” for no reason at all.

This is my second UROP here at MIT. The way I managed to get this one is I emailed a lot of professors who were doing interesting research. I tried not to be too picky because learning is learning, and you’ll get that in pretty much all UROPs. A couple days later, I got a response from the director of the BPEC who forwarded the message out to her lab, and I’ve been a member of the lab ever since last October. My first UROP freshman year was in the Humans and Automation Lab where I researched how people evaluate computer software for errors.

I could go into greater detail about the device and our research, but if you have additional questions, just email me at [email protected] or post a comment, and I’ll respond. Any questions about UROPs in general or how to get one?

(Thanks to Anjana for help with the title. I stole it from her away message.)