What

A summer in the Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program, on the bioengineering track, in an electrical-engineering lab working on microrobots for minimally invasive medicine — devices small enough to be introduced into the body and powered and steered from outside it.

Why it mattered

First contact with research as it is actually practised, while still in high school: reading the literature, building the thing, measuring whether it did what the physics said it would. It is also the first appearance of the question that never went away — how do you get a measurement or an intervention inside a living body without opening it?

My role

Prototyped a microrobot demonstrating two propulsion mechanisms, piezoelectricity and the Lorentz force, working alongside postdoctoral researchers in the lab.

Outcome

Presented the work as a poster at the close of the program.