"Hi.
My name is Neha Garg.
We are at Dr. Lee's Lab at UC Irvine.
I'm a first year PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Neha is studying cancer cells and how they circulate and increase in the body.
She studies them through microfluidic devices which are small chips designed to analyze
small amounts of fluid.
I'm from India basically and I saw many rural areas where there is a very, very low scope
of building those labs where we can do the bench experiments.
There's a dire need to have these portable devices where a patient can test their cancer
type or the diagnostics can be done in a very low cost system.
That's why this will help those patients who are not very rich.
They do not have the money to go to a big hospital.
That's how this can benefit those people and we can treat them on the spot.
This is the LCAT device that I am working on.
This is the side channel with the air pocket, the end side channels.
This device is used for the separation of rare cells for example, circulating tumor
cells.
Science basically was my first choice because I'm from a family where I have two elder sisters.
My eldest sister is a doctor and I saw her going to hospital and she's talking about
all the patients and science, basically.
My sisters are true inspirations.
We are from a girl family and there are still some families in India that believe â€˜why
spend so much money on girl's education?'
We three sisters wanted to give something to my parents that they can feel proud of.
My hope is that my research will give me those portable diagnostic chips which can be used
by the doctors in conjunction with an Android app that can give the results as quickly as
possible.
Working in a lab is very exciting.
Our lab is a small family so we do work in teams of two to three where the graduates
have post docs above them who can mentor them and we can discuss the problems which we are
encountering in our experiments so that can bring us some improvements in our research.
Science is a growing field.
Information can only be obtained with a larger number of people involved in science.
When I was in India doing my undergraduate studies, I saw that there are less women faculty
in my department.
In fact, to be frank there was no women faculty in India.
We need more young ladies to be involved in research so that every research can have a
female perspective which is very, very important since in the gender population there are women
and there are men.
Don't be afraid.
Involve yourself.
Just be about perseverance and hard work and you will be as good as you want."