[ANNCR] SHE RUNS A RESEARCH LAB.
SHE TEACHES AT A UNIVERSITY.
AND SHE'S A CO-FOUNDER OF A NANOTECHNOLOGIES COMPANY.
[ANNCR] LIVING BY THE WISDOM OF YODA, BIOMEDICAL
ENGINEER MICHELLE KHINE IS ALL ABOUT EMBRACING LIFE.
The problems that we work on, these are important problems.
There is a possibility that we can really make a huge impact on, on people's lives.
That, you know, that's a great motivator.
[ANNCR] BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERS LIKE MICHELLE COMBINE BIOLOGY,
MEDICINE AND ENGINEERING TO DESIGN AND DEVELOP NEW EQUIPMENT
AND METHODS THAT IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF HUMAN HEALTH AND LIFE.
THEY DESIGN EVERYTHING FROM SURGICAL DEVICES,
PROSTHETICS AND ARTIFICIAL ORGANS,
TO SYSTEMS FOR MEDICAL IMAGING, PATIENT MONITORING, AND DIAGNOSING DISEASE.
THEY ALSO DEVELOP NEW MEDICAL PROCEDURES, AND RESEARCH SOLUTIONS TO CLINICAL PROBLEMS.
I get to teach and work with students, and work at a university,
and I also get to have a company on
the side, and work with industry, so I feel like it's the best of all worlds.
Yeah it worked really well and I'm looking forward to getting this into
the hands of students and researchers
[ANNCR] MICHELLE HAS PIONEERED
ADVANCEMENTS IN MANUFACTURING MEDICAL DIAGNOSTIC CHIPS.
A NEW TECHNOLOGY THAT MINIATURIZES LAB TESTING
INITIALLY, THE CHIPS WHICH CONTAIN MICROFLUIDIC CHANNELS
FOR MOVING FLUID THROUGH A SERIES OF LAB TESTS REQUIRED
VERY EXPENSIVE EQUIPMENT,
AND TOOK A LONG TIME TO MAKE.
REMEMBERING HER FAVORITE CHILDHOOD CRAFT, MICHELLE GOT A CRAZY IDEA.
So I was playing as I usually do, in my kitchen
one night, and I realized that if I took Shrinky Dinks,
and I patterned onto the Shrinky Dinks, when they shrink down, um I could use
the features on the Shrinky Dinks to create my micro fluidic chips.
These are pre-stressed thermal plastic sheets.
So you can imagine it's sort of like a rubber band
that's stretched out and then frozen down right?
So when you heat them up, the polymer chains relax, and they go back to
their relaxed state, so they shrink back.
To be perfectly honest, it was really hard in the beginning.
I came up with this idea, and we published, you know I tried to
convince my students to use a children's toy for their
science, and they were like, people are gonna laugh at us.
[ANNCR] BUT PEOPLE DIDN'T LAUGH.
THE INVENTION WENT VIRAL ON THE INTERNET AND CATAPULTED
MICHELLE INTO THE SPOTLIGHT. SCIENTISTS FROM ALL OVER THE
WORLD WERE NOW INTERESTED IN MICHELLE'S "LAB-ON-A-CHIP"
If I treat one patient I can treat that patient, but if you come up with a medical
invention... a technology that can save hundreds of thousands of lives at once,
that's you know, that would be really cool
So this small size here is 1.5 microns, um,
the width of your human hair is about 150 microns.
So this is about 1/100th, the size is 1/100th of the width of your hair.
[ANNCR] MICHELLE AND HER RESEARCH TEAM HAVE ALSO BEEN WORKING ON WAYS
TO GROW EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS INTO HEART MUSCLE CELLS.
And then once we create these cardio myocytes, we need to figure
out how to maturate them so that they're functional heart cells.
A day in the life of me.
I usually play soccer with my dog in the morning, and then I walk to work.
I come in and I work with the students, and uhh, we work on coming up with a new crazy
ideas, and writing papers and working on grants.
Uhh, I have a company on the side, so I work with the company also;
we're trying to commercialize our first 2 products this year.
[ANNCR] AS SCIENTIFIC FOUNDER AND A MEMBER OF SHRINK
NANOTECHOLOGIES SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD, MICHELLE HELPS
RESEARCH AND DEVELOP NEW BIOMEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES AND PRODUCTS.
SHE ALSO LOOKS AT WAYS TO IMPROVE AND EXPAND THE
BENEFITS OF EXISTING PRODUCT LINES.
I like to tell people that um I make accessories. Um, I'm still a girl (laughs).
A big part of my lab is focused on developing point of care
diagnostic devices our goal is to be able to bring really inexpensive
plastic chips to the developing world, so that we can
detect and therefore treat infectious diseases, umm early on.
We're meeting with the chair of the pediatrics department at
the medical school here, because he's very interested in bringing
these technologies to the real world.
[Feizal] And so if you can even have a screening test that can be done at the bedside.
[Michelle] Uh huh.
It's a neat job because you don't check in in the
morning with somebody, you don't check out, right?
You decide what problems are important to you, you work on
those problems and you police yourself.
[ANNCR] LIKE MANY ENGINEERS, MICHELLE TENDS TO THINK ABOUT HER WORK 24/7, SO
SHE STRESSES THE IMPORTANCE OF BALANCE IN HER LIFE.
I love to play. I also discovered a new sport called Acro Yoga, which is
basically two person yoga, and you can do, you know, flips and aerials and, it's really fun.
I used to be in, big into biking.
we built a human powered vehicle when I was um, at Berkeley.
[ANNCR] IN FACT, MICHELLE HOLDS A LAND SPEED WORLD RECORD FOR A
BIKE SHE HELPED DESIGN AND BUILD IN GRAD SCHOOL.
Being able to really have the
conviction to carry it thru to the end, knowing that it might
not work is, is very difficult,
I think I'm an optimist at heart, and so that, that kinda keeps me going.
It feels like a cooking show.
[ANNCR] MICHELLE HOLDS A BACHELOR OF SCIENCE AND MASTER
OF SCIENCE DEGREE IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, AND A PHD IN BIOENGINEERING.
I decided to become an engineer because I was
really bad at math and science. And I thought that if I studied
hard enough, and I worked on it enough, that I'd get good at it,
so I did a summer
internship in biomedical engineering when I was 15, and I loved it.
It's hands on, it's real world, you feel like you're, you're making a difference,
you're not solving problems that other people have solved before,
these are brand new problems that people need answers to. And that's cool.
[ANNCR] BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERS
WORK IN HOSPITALS, UNIVERSITIES, INDUSTRY AND LABORATORIES.
THEY WORK WITH PHYSICAL SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS, CLINICIANS,
LIFE SCIENTISTS, CHEMISTS AND MEDICAL SCIENTISTS.
I think biomedical engineering is extremely collaborative.
And I think that's what I love best about it.
[Michelle] What is that? Have you ever seen that deposit on metals before?
[Shimizu] On that scale, no.
[Michelle] It's this culture of working together and
and talking with each other, and coming up with new ideas, and
forming these collaborations, even if they're on the other
side of the world, your world feels very close...
you don't feel isolated at all.
It's been a great ride.
It's far exceeded any expectation or dream I could have had.
It's um, it's been really fun.
I've gotten to go, uh, give talks, at really cool
places‚, "Vancouver" "Hong Kong" "the Caribbean".
I was invited to MIT for, for the TR 35 award, which was really exciting for me.
it's been amazing.
I was real fortunate to have gone into biomedical engineering.
I can't imagine a better job in the world.