Biomed Faculty, Undergraduates Join Superman’s Team

  by John Gagnon

Ryan Gilbert has what looks like a dog tag hanging on the wall of his office. Affixed to a small chain is an ornament the size of a half dollar. It bears a Superman logo and the words, “Go forward.” The back side reads, “Christopher Reeve Foundation” — a research initiative established to address the paralysis that proved to be a real, super man’s krypton.

Gilbert, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is inspired by the message as he strives to repair spinal cord injuries and allow paralyzed people to use their limbs again. Gilbert immerses himself in tissue engineering to help regenerate nerves after injury to the spinal cord.

This daunting endeavor is met with indomitable spirit. “We keep this going-forward mentality,” Gilbert says of his work and the students helping him. “When you pick research, you want to pick something that can make a difference in people’s lives. Currently there is nothing that can help these patients with spinal cord injuries. I try to make that evident to the students—that what they’re doing might help somebody some day. We have great students.”

Gilbert’s colleague, Jeremy Goldman, also an assistant professor, says that typically in the US undergraduate students don’t get to participate in research or interact with faculty “in a very serious way.” Their duties, he adds, are usually limited to taking out the trash and washing flasks. Not at Tech, and not in biomedical engineering. Goldman’s students, then, like Gilbert’s, are on the cusp of innovation, working with him on the lymphatic system—specifically trying to reduce edema (abnormal swelling).

The students, Goldman says, grow steadily from neophytes to young scientists. “They read the scientific literature and understand the field—so they appreciate the problems and unanswered questions. They formulate hypotheses, design and run experiments, do the histology and surgery on mice, collect and section tissue specimens, photograph cells, collect data, and report results. They rely heavily on the faculty advisor so they don’t go astray. They get to see several things fail before something succeeds.”

The students and faculty comprise a diverse group, bound by discipline and by a dream of a better life for the rest of the world. They also are decidedly collegial, with faculty and students together celebrating lab successes with movies, picnics, and dinners.

“It takes awhile to get them trained, but they’re extremely enthusiastic, they’re very bright, and they find this fun and exciting,” Goldman says. “They’re doing things that are tedious and sometimes boring, but there are parts of it that are exciting and they just soak it all up and they do well. It’s a great relationship. They’re learning and we’re getting research done.”

Students working with Goldman first and foremost encounter his curiosity. “I’ve always been questioning everything around me,” Goldman says. “Never really accepting things, like diseases, as they are—always wondering why they can’t be a different way.” He imparts that probing attitude to his undergraduate researchers, and describes the collective inquiry simply as “stimulating.”

For his part, Gilbert adds, “I have my door always open to students. They can stop by and ask me questions anytime. That frame of mind is not just my own. It’s everybody here.”

All of it ties in with the vision that Chair Michael Neuman has for the department. “We want,” he concludes, “to do something special very well.

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