Brianna Conte: Prolific Undergraduate Researcher Heads to Med School
Dr. Jacob Elmer and Brianna Conte 鈥19 EE
Who: Brianna Conte 鈥19 EE, minors in Honors and Bioengineering
What: Presidential Scholar, undergraduate researcher, tutor, intern, volunteer
Highlights of 奶糖直播 Experience:
- Part of Dr. Jacob Elmer鈥檚 InnoCentive team, which won a $25,000 prize for developing a device that could continuously measure the blood content in a small volume of saline solution within a thin, flexible probe
- Former president of 奶糖直播鈥檚 student chapter of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
- Served on the research team of the Drug Discovery and Development Laboratory
- Won the 2019 Electrical Engineering Outstanding Student Medallion
- Won a Dean鈥檚 Award for Academic Excellence
- Won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Italy (which she declined to attend medical school)
Prototypes and Publications:
- Created a low-cost chromatography system for protein purification using new technologies including a 3D printer and Arduino to lower the cost from $10,000 to under $1,000. Her work took second place at the 奶糖直播 Sigma Xi Research Competition in the Undergraduate Engineering category and led to a manuscript submission to 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing
- Co-authored 鈥,鈥 which appeared in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing and reflected work completed for the InnoCentive challenge
- Co-authored "fNIRS Implementation in Semantic Memory Recall" after a two-semester independent study with Dr. Meltem Izzetoglu and joint pilot study with Dr. Irene Kan of the Psychology department. The paper was accepted and presented at the BMES (Biomedical Engineering Society) 2019 conference and reflected her work in collecting and analyzing brain imaging data using functional near infrared spectroscopy during a picture naming task.
- Co-authored with Dr. Pritpal Singh, "Health Information Management System for a Rural Medical Clinic in Nicaragua," which was presented at the 2019 IEEE CONCAPAN conference.
What鈥檚 next: After undergraduate research experience in biomedical engineering and volunteer work at Bryn Mawr Hospital, Brianna is attending the University of Miami鈥檚 Medical School.