BME Senior wins prestigious Churchill Scholarship

Sandya Subramanian, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics, received the Churchill Scholarship, awarded to a small number of American students in the science, engineering, and mathematics fields. The grant pays for students to pursue a one-year Master’s degree at Cambridge.

“I was specifically only looking at one-year programs because I knew that I eventually want to come back to the U.S. to do my Ph.D.,” Subramanian said.

The scholarship covers tuition, room and board at Churchill College and a stipend that can be applied towards travel or additional research.

Subramanian has been deeply involved in biomedical research and engineering during her time at Hopkins. She worked in the lab of Assistant Professor Sridevi Sarma where she helped develop technology to assist doctors in treating epilepsy.

“Epilepsy is a disorder of having seizures, because you have uncontrolled electrical activity in your brain. So for the people who don’t respond to medication, their only option is to have surgery to have the part of their brain that causes the seizures removed. And it’s highly invasive surgery as you might think,” Subramanian said. “The failure rate of the surgery is very high, it’s up to like 60 percent, which means you go into someone’s brain and remove a chunk of their brain and they still have seizures afterwards... [We wanted] to see if we could get a computer to help a doctor figure out what part of the brain is causing the seizures.”

Subramanian also participated in the Department of Biomedical Engineering’s Design Team Program, in which she and fellow engineers developed their own inventions. During her sophomore year, Subramanian and her team worked to improve current defibrillation technology, participating in the Collegiate Inventors Competition.

“Defibrillation is when someone goes into cardiac arrest or has some kind of life-threatening arrhythmia, or weird heart rhythm. It’s on all TV shows and movies, you grab the paddles and you shock,” Subramanian said. “Except now they don’t do the paddles, they use these adhesive patches that they stick onto the person and they shock them. The problem is that if the first shock doesn’t work, some literature indicates it might be helpful to switch the positions of the patches to move them around… What happens is these things are stickers, and you can’t pull them off and stick them back on again. It seems like a really stupid problem, but it actually is an issue and it hasn’t been solved.”

Subramanian and her team developed a system wherein patches are applied to multiples points on a person’s body, and the electrical charge can be directed to different patches, thus removing the need to remove and reapply the adhesive patches.

Subramanian led her design team in her junior year, during which they developed a wearable defibrillator vest.

“For people who are waiting to get an implantable [deliberator], which is a long term solution, while they’re waiting they’re still at high risk to go into arrhythmia [irregular electrical activity of the heart], so this is a temporary solution until they can get one.”

At Cambridge, Subramanian plans to pursue her interest in computational neuroscience.

“There’s this thing called the default resting network,” Subramanian said. “Basically the idea that when your brain is idle or not doing any tasks, your brain has a default network of how things are connected to each other. The hypothesis is that when you start actively doing some tasks, actually engaging your brain, something switches, the network changes. But the idea that there is this default network is something that is only recently been accepted, and it’s something that would be very interesting to find out about... If you don’t know what normal or resting state is, you can’t really figure out what’s different when something goes wrong.”

Subramanian credits her reasons for studying biomedical engineering and applied math to her dual interests in mathematics and medicine.

“When I came out of high school, I liked math a lot, so I knew I wanted to do engineering,” Subramanian said. “And my mom’s a doctor, so I always had a lot of exposure to health related things. So this [biomedical engineering] kind of seemed like the natural bridge between the two. I took on applied math after I came here because I realized I really liked the math part of this, and even in BME my focus area is computational biology. I realized that I really liked applying the math to a biological situation.”

Subramanian is already planning on her future after Cambridge.

“I’m also applying for Ph.D. programs the year after that [Cambridge], back here in the States,” she said.