Women in BME: Alyse Krausz

Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. Candidate

“My goal as a biomedical engineer is to develop portable, diagnostic tests so that medical professionals may accurately assess patients in hospitals, in the field, and all locations in between. I am currently developing a hand-held device designed to speed up a blood test for brain injuries, allowing doctors to accurately diagnose concussions on the sidelines in fifteen minutes. Concussions and other types of traumatic brain injuries are difficult for doctors to diagnose because of the tests available. Doctors can ask a patient questions or take a CAT scan of the brain, but these diagnostic methods require the doctor to make a judgment call. If a doctor makes the wrong call, a patient could go back out on the field with a concussion, putting themselves at risk of permanent brain damage or death. To remove this judgment call, a blood test for brain injuries was developed. However, this test takes hours to run in a hospital laboratory when it needs to be run on the sidelines in minutes. Our hand-held, rapid diagnostic device could fundamentally change the way concussions are assessed and monitored.”

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“I made a YouTube video last summer summarizing my work on the traumatic brain injury diagnostic device. I am still working on publishing a paper.”

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“I pursued a degree in Biomedical Engineering because it allowed me to combine my interest in medicine with my aptitude for biology and math. I discovered the field of diagnostics through undergraduate research and industrial internship opportunities. I became fascinated with designing devices that could analyze blood samples for molecular traces of injury or illness, and I decided to pursue this line of research during my Ph.D.”

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“In BME, I am seldom the only woman in the room. In fact, my lab will be made up entirely of female graduate students and postdocs by the end of the summer. I have benefited greatly from the support and guidance of my female mentors and colleagues throughout my undergraduate and graduate careers. I have a tendency to keep my ideas to myself, but my mentors have always encouraged me to speak up. My advice to women pursuing a career in BME, or in any field, is to make your ideas heard and take credit for them.”

Learn more about her lab here.