Projects ranged from diabetes, sepsis sensors to bone modeling
Photos by Ralph Freso/GCU News
With a PowerPoint on the screen packed with graphs, charts and numbers, Saloni Jain shares the latest on her project with a team of about 20 student researchers.
“The best curve was Sensor 1 for both of them,” Jain said, then spilled the tea on what she and teammate Amshuman Kaza observed: “But there was a lot of inconsistency between the sensors.”
“Maybe, if it was a used sensor, it was past its lifetime,” suggested Dr. Jeff La Belle, professor of biomedical engineering at Grand Canyon University and the namesake of La Belle Labs, which occupies a first-floor wing of the Engineering Building.
Then deeper into the numbers, he gets the same gut feeling as Jain and Kaza.
“This data is telling us something different,” he said. “… If we see that data is way different, we can call hooey on that. But there’s something wrong about this one.”
La Belle delves into the data with Jain and Kaza, just two of eight high school student interns on La Belle’s team this summer.
They’re working alongside La Belle’s GCU student researchers on a slew of projects, from helping create diabetes and sepsis sensors to creating a bone-like material that will help orthopedic surgeons test devices.
The team meets once a week to present its findings.
It’s practice for bigger presentations at the end of the summer that La Belle is planning for students to do in front of some of the people for whom they are developing the devices.
La Belle has mentored more than 300 students and postgraduates over his career spanning more than 25 years, like he is this summer for high school and university students hoping to launch into engineering, medical and other careers in the sciences. He wants to build their lab skills in a collaborative space alongside college undergraduates, professors and industry.
And he isn’t the only GCU mentor.
So is La Belle’s team of undergraduate students, such as pre-veterinary junior Natalie Charney, who is working in the Pro Social Animal Lab but also assisting La Belle while working with the high school students.
“I mentor them and watch over them. I love it. I’m all here for it,” Charney said of the whole lab experience.
With multiple projects buzzing in the lab, this summer seemed like a perfect time for the high school interns, who initially connect with GCU through the university’s K12 Educational Development Department. That department works with high schools that want to place their students in lab experiences. K12 then partners with Canyon Emerging Scholars and professors from the university’s various colleges.
Jane Jeyaraj, a senior at Paradise Valley High School, is spending her summer working on a project to electroplate needles with three different metals, primarily gold. The needles, once in the skin, will gather data about insulin and glucose to help better monitor patients with diabetes.
“We’re trying to get an even layer on them. That’s our end goal,” said Jeyaraj, who heard about the internship through her high school’s internship coordinator. Jeyaraj is required to complete an internship her senior year and saw that someone else from her school did a past internship at GCU.
“I thought it was really cool,” she said of the work being done by La Belle at GCU. “So I sent out an email.”
La Belle said the wearable diabetes sensors his team is designing are being electroplated in gold for a reason. Medical device engineers, such as La Belle, are well-versed in how gold reacts with the body.
“We know what it’s going to do when it comes to fabricating the sensors, and we have to put the enzymes on there and things like that to measure glucose,” La Belle said. “We know how gold interacts with those things, so it’s really easy to put them together. It’s stable, it’s safe and it works.”
Another goal of the project is to automate the electroplating process.
“It’s pretty hands-on making these things, so we want to go into higher quantity manufacturing,” La Belle said. “Right now, it takes us three days of very hands-on work to make them. … If I had to sit there and do the work, that’s crazy. If I can just hit ‘Go’ and walk away? … That’s the challenge those kids are working on.”
Kaza, a freshman at Mountain Ridge High School, is part of three projects, one of them to create bone models for a wound-healing project. He said he has looked at different concentrations of resin and Plaster of Paris in making these bones and testing for density and other characteristics.
“I have a couple of my students, a pre-vet, an engineer and a high school student who are doing a bone-like surrogate product. That’s kind of important in a lot of medical devices we may test,” La Belle said. “We may need to put it on a bone, but we can’t (on human bone). So we make one that’s close to it.
“But the doctors want something that’s really close to bone, so that project is really kind of fun.”
It is related to another one going on in La Belle’s lab to help an orthopedic surgeon find a better way to do a particular surgery.
La Belle said that surgeon has described the surgery – six hands in a particular area of the body, all the tools the surgeon has to hold, a plate that’s dropped and screwed into that area.
“He goes, you even learn how to hold things in your fingers, like this vs. your fingers here, vs. a finger there, and you’ve got three things in this hand. You’ve got another thing in this hand. He’s like, ‘It’s so frustrating,’” La Belle said.
“So we’re trying to work with him on developing a device that can go in there and hold everything together, including the broken bones. Then they could go in there and put the plates on, then take everything off except for what they really need to put in there.”
La Belle is guiding students who are assigned to that project, as well as a sepsis project that Shadow Mountain High School senior Rijul Gupta has been living this summer. She’s working alongside Jain, a senior at BASIS Phoenix, on a sensor that will identify sepsis before it gets worse by looking at certain biomarkers.
Another high school student who’s part of La Belle’s team is building a historical display for Cutter Aviation, headquartered in Phoenix.
You have to be really meticulous with the work. If even one thing goes wrong, you could get wide-ranging results.
Saloni Jain,
BASIS Phoenix senior and an intern at La Belle Labs, GCU
Gupta heard about the internship after reading a GCU News article.
“I thought it was quite interesting,” she said. “ … It talked about professor La Belle, and he just really looked like a good mentor and somebody who would guide me well. And so I reached out and emailed and we talked through Zoom. … I thought, ‘Yeah, I want to do this.’”
Gupta, who worked a lot in the wet lab this summer, said what she learned during her time at GCU this summer was something as non-scientific as working on Excel spreadsheets and how to helm a presentation. She also learned how to prepare for her experiments and became familiar with different types of chemicals, fluids and machines.
Jeyaraj said what she loved is learning to pipette, measure and do electrochemical testing. “We don’t really have a huge lab in our school to do any of that, so it was a lot of fun to learn that.”
As for Kaza, it was about working on a team.
Jain said her high school doesn’t have a research program, so this opportunity at GCU was something she sought, since she’s thinking about becoming a researcher. Her big takeaway: “You have to be really meticulous with the work. If even one thing goes wrong, you could get wide-ranging results.”
More than that, it encouraged her to remain on her research path.
“It showed me how challenging research is," Jain said. "It just made me want to do it more.”
Lana Sweeten-Shults, internal communications manager and the editor for GCU News, can be reached at [email protected].
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