Ritu Raman, the d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, focuses on constructing with biology, utilizing dwelling cells. Photo: David Sella
By Daniel de Wolff | MIT Industrial Liaison Program
It would appear that engineering is in Ritu Raman’s blood. Her mom is a chemical engineer, her father is a mechanical engineer, and her grandfather is a civil engineer. A typical thread amongst her childhood experiences was witnessing firsthand the helpful affect that engineering careers might have on communities. One of her earliest reminiscences is watching her mother and father construct communication towers to attach the agricultural villages of Kenya to the worldwide infrastructure. She remembers the joy she felt watching the emergence of a bodily manifestation of innovation that may have a long-lasting optimistic affect on the neighborhood.
Raman is, as she places it, “a mechanical engineer through and through.” She earned her BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering. Her postdoc at MIT was funded by a L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine.
Today, Ritu Raman leads the Raman Lab and is an assistant professor within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. But Raman isn’t tied to conventional notions of what mechanical engineers ought to be constructing or the supplies usually related to the sphere. “As a mechanical engineer, I’ve pushed back against the idea that people in my field only build cars and rockets from metals, polymers, and ceramics. I’m interested in building with biology, with living cells,” she says.
Our machines, from our telephones to our vehicles, are designed with very particular functions. And they aren’t low-cost. But a dropped telephone or a crashed automotive might imply the tip of it, or on the very least an costly restore invoice. For probably the most half, that isn’t the case with our our bodies. Biological supplies have an unparalleled means to sense, course of, and reply to their surroundings in real-time. “As humans, if we cut our skin or if we fall, we’re able to heal,” says Raman. “So, I started wondering, ‘Why aren’t engineers building with the materials that have these dynamically responsive capabilities?’”
These days, Raman is targeted on constructing actuators (gadgets that present motion) powered by neurons and skeletal muscle that may train us extra about how we transfer and the way we navigate the world. Specifically, she’s creating millimeter-scale fashions of skeletal muscle managed by the motor neurons that assist us plan and execute motion in addition to the sensory neurons that inform us how to reply to dynamic modifications in our surroundings.
Eventually, her actuators could information the best way to constructing higher robots. Today, even our most superior robots are a far cry from having the ability to reproduce human movement — our means to run, leap, pivot on a dime, and alter course. But bioengineered muscle made in Raman’s lab has the potential to create robots which can be extra dynamically aware of their environments.
tags: c-Research-Innovation
MIT News