Shriya Srinivasan as a dancer and researcher | Snapshots taken from ‘Connecting the human body to the outside world’ video on YouTube
“The human body is just engineered so beautifully,” says Shriya Srinivasan PhD ’20, a analysis affiliate at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, a junior fellow on the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and former doctoral scholar within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Both a biomedical engineer and a dancer, Srinivasan is devoted to investigating the physique’s actions and sensations. As a PhD scholar she labored in Media Lab Professor Hugh Herr’s Biomechatronics Group on a system that helps sufferers with amputation really feel what their prostheses are feeling and ship suggestions from the gadget to the physique. She has additionally studied the south Indian classical dance type Bharathanatyam for 22 years and co-directs the Anubhava Dance Company.
“The kind of relief and sense of fulfillment I get from the arts is very different from what I get from research and science,” she says. “I find that research often nourishes my intellectual curiosity, and the arts are helping to build that emotional and spiritual growth. But in both worlds, I’m thinking about how we create a sense of feeling, how we control emotion and your physiological response. That’s really beautiful to me.”
Video by: Jason Kimball/MIT News | 5 minutes 34 seconds.
MIT News