"Speaker 1: Drexel university in Philadelphia caters to some of the finest engineers in
the country.
The biomedical engineering department is doing particularly well.
Graduate student and researcher, Youhan Sunny, discusses his work within the department.
Speaker 2: So, my name is Youhan Sunny.
I'm 30.
I'm doing a PhD in biomedical engineering at Drexel.
My interest is in ultrasound and specifically therapeutical transducers.
What is involved in my research, its mostly building the transducer . So normal out the
transducers are used for diagnostic purposes.
You use the transducers to look at stuff inside your body or its also used outside like oil
pipes, to see if there are cracks.
That's the most common acceptable uses of ultrasound.
What I do is, make the same or similar ultrasound transducers to treat things.
So, there is diagnostics and there is therapy; diagnostics is trying to determine what's
wrong, and therapy is trying to fix what's wrong.
So right now, what I'm trying to do is make transducers for ultrasound to fix things and
not necessarily to look at what's wrong.
So the science behind what I'm doing is very simple, if you look at it from a physical
perspective.
So what I'm doing is taking something called a transducer and any transducers are the simplest
devices which convert one form of energy to a different form of energy.
So anything and everything that you see around is a different use a transducer.
If you look at a wall clock, that's a transducer, as in its taking the energy from a battery
and its showing you time.
So its transducing - one form of energy to something entirely different.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
I'm taking a transducer which converts electricity into pressure waves or sound waves.
So the device I'm making is very similar to a speaker if you will, which you give it a
signal, voltage, excitation, and then it produces a sound.
The transducer I'm building does the same, the exact same thing.
It takes an electricity and makes sound, the only difference is, that the sound it makes
is not audible to humans.
Speaker 1: Youhan is very dedicated to his research.
He explains how his life led up to his career in the biomedical engineering field.
Speaker 2 There is no short answer to that.
There is whole long story why I got involved in biomedical research.
But, my undergrad was in electronics and biomedical engineering, which is like saying to in India
that its electronics and communication, which means you do electronics and then your specialization
is in communication technology, like you know, cell phones or towers, antennas, that kind
of things.
My was in electronics and the concentration was more in biomedical engineering, and devices
related to the medical field.
So that is a reason why I got into the whole medical research and medical instruments,
and which is why I'm doing the same thing.
Speaker 2 : Do I enjoy my job doing research?
Yes, I enjoy my job doing research.
First of all I enjoy it because it is very open or the questions are open-ended and the
work that you do is also open ended and there is a lot of leeway in what you want to do,
and you are doing things different in a way, and you are trying to do new things, which
is what is very interesting to me.
You are always challenged by things.
What's creative is, that what I'm doing is something new, its something that nobody has
ever done before or nobody has ever attempted to do before.
So, yes, its also I'm doing something based on the theories or the principles that are
already established and using it to do something new and different.
Honestly, what drives me to work hard is, one thing is you see the transducers that
I'm trying to build being used practically.
I mean, making something for research and doing research and making something rudimentary,
a lot of different people, a lot of people are doing the same thing.
You do something, you make, you know you find out something, then you just leave it at that.
What drives me is to see it to a further stage where its actually helping people and its
actually, in a more commercial stage where people actually have access to the newer technology
that's being developed through research.
Lot of times you have research and that's totally separate from the clinic or the clinical
aspect of things that never really get to the people.
And there are a lot of technologies out there like that.
So what drives me is to make it better, so that it can actually be used to help people.
Speaker 1: With some complications in the past, his project has been overall very successful.
The transducers will some day benefit not only Philadelphians but everyone able to walk
into a drug store.
Speaker 2: Well, I hope to achieve a Nobel Prize.
But, seriously, I want to make something that will help people in the end.
And, it is working out fine for me because the transducers I'm using, is actually being
used in human trials, so they are actually being used on humans to treat people with
actual needs.
They have chronic wounds that don't heal on their own.
They have these wounds for years and they never heal, and limited human study that we
did, we proved that by using the transducer, it can he healed.
So the wounds that were treated with the transducers healed versus the ones which were not treated
by transducers.
So in the end, what I'm making is being used.
We are trying to do more trials to make it more effective, and so as to actually make
it into a commercial device.
But I'm happy that its being used in a useful way for people, to help people.
So yes."