Stimulating Experiences - Kirby Leo

My typical monitor setup for harvesting
 and visualizing cardiac signals.

I’ve had a couple productive weeks working on my heart-on-a-chip project. I’ve been moving on to deeply investigating the impact of stimulations on my chip electrodes. Using concepts of impedance and capacitance, I have been able to characterize the quality of our chips based on specific stimulations. Simultaneously, I have been testing different impedance analyzer setups that aren’t just relevant to me and my supervisor, but also other members of Cell and Tissue Technologies (CTT) at imec.

Additionally, I am still generating and going through much of my cardiomyocyte data. A part of my analysis includes utilizing scripts that my supervisor has written to extract data from my cardiac recordings and organize them for plotting. It has been a good exercise for me in understanding data portrayal and what makes an honest figure. I still have experiments to run before my presentation, and though I have been already keeping track of my work on a singular document, I’m excited to make a brief presentation for a general audience and finally wrap my work together. There are of course many experiments to further this project, but my timeline limits me and I’m hoping to see my work being fuel for further studies.

Possibly the edgiest - but strangely
cleanest - Gent alleyway I've ever
been in!

With my time here wrapping up, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my research experience here. Though the research I do here is centered on micro-electronics, which is not a field I have had much experience in, I found that it wasn’t as difficult to get into the work as I had expected due to my prior experiences, specifically with research culture and the scientific method that I have picked up from labs that I have worked in previously. Additionally, some of the work theoretically strikes a note of familiarity considering my training as a student in biomedical engineering. This has given me new confidence in entering new fields and using interdisciplinary approaches. I’ll be incorporating the quantitative style of problem solving and systematic approach that I’ve so distinctly picked up in my time here at imec into my future research.

To cap it off, I’ve attended Beleuvenissen, a popular music festival based in Leuven’s center that’s been happening for the last two Fridays, with my coworkers from Life Science Technologies/CTT, and I’ve had a great time getting to know some of Belgium’s music and hanging in the Leuven atmosphere. I’ve also made the decision to stay within Belgium for the rest of my time here to soak in the experience, and I have been back to Brussels and attended the famous Gent Festival. I’m hoping to get the most out of the cultural and work life in Belgium in the next couple weeks before I leave.

Discobaar a Moeder (a Belgian music group) at Beleuvenissen II attracted quite a crowd