Jessie Huang Receives 2013 Undergraduate Student Paper Award

Jessie Huang (BE’13) is a recipient of the 2013 Undergraduate Student Paper Award granted by the Philadelphia Engineering Foundation and the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia. As part of the 2013 Delaware Valley Engineers Week (DVEW), local engineers and educators gathered for an awards luncheon on February 15, 2013, to recognize outstanding math and science teachers, high school students, college students, and professional engineers. This year, Huang was one of three Penn Engineering students to receive a DVEW award.

Huang’s paper, Rat Precision-Cut Lung Slices as a Model for Deformation-Induced Lung Injury Studies, was the result of her junior-year research experience in the Injury Biomechanics Lab led by Susan Margulies, George H. Stephenson Term Chair and Professor in Bioengineering. Huang’s project involved creating a new model for studying ventilator-induced lung injury, which occurs in 5 to 15 percent of ventilated patients in intensive care units and is associated with a high morbidity rate. Throughout her project, she gained experience in performing animal and cell culture experiments, as well as running data analysis.

“My research experience at Penn really shaped my academic and career goals,” says Huang. “I think that being a BE student gave me access to a lot of research opportunities early on, even though I had no research experience coming out of high school.”

In addition to her undergraduate research, Huang is a Fellow in Penn Engineering’s Technical Communication Program (TCP) and is an alumna of the program herself. She credits the skills she learned as part of TCP with her success in writing her paper and preparing an effective platform presentation for the 2012 Northeast Bioengineering Conference.

The TCP Program offers EAS 500: Technical Communication in Engineering Practice, a course for engineering students who wish to increase their proficiency in writing research papers and other tech-centric communications. Huang notes, “In addition to research papers, my experiences with the TCP Program have helped considerably in assembling graduate school applications.”