Q: Why did you choose to become an engineer?

Gee: Like many other high school students, I liked math and science but had little idea of engineering itself. Once I gained a better understanding of the field, I stayed because I liked that the primary goal of engineering was to build something usable, and maybe answer an interesting scientific question along the way. Science tends to have the primary and secondary goals flipped, which is great, but less interesting to me.

Q: What brought you to UD?

Gee: UD’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering program has a great reputation. Additionally, The department was large enough to host a wide variety of research areas, while also small enough to feel a sense of community.

Q: Describe your thesis project.

Gee: My thesis project is to build computational models of how the brain tells the heart how fast to beat. Most people think of heart disease as only a problem with the heart itself. Recently, there has been growing awareness that the brain’s regulation of heart rate and blood pressure can lead to this disease as well. My thesis advisors and I are building models to help better understand how heart disease can be treated, through changing how the brain regulates the heart.

Q: Describe your Experimental Physiology and journal publications.

Gee: In the AIChE Journal publication, we developed a model of how the human body controls blood pressure to explore an emerging heart failure treatment involving nerve stimulation to the heart. We identified which nerves are activated during the treatment and which are not.

Our work in Experimental Physiology builds on this by creating a framework for integrating data from many data sources into the mathematical model developed in the AIChE Journal study. In the last five years, advancements in technology have enabled  the collection of data on thousands of genes in thousands of individual cells. While patterns in this data are observable, predicting treatment outcomes requires computational models. Our work provides one possible road map for building those models.

In our latest Journal of Physiology work, we investigate how the brain regulates the heart after a heart attack to compensate for lost heart function. Using  the AIChE Journal model,  we simulated heart injury and analyzed brain compensation strategies, identifying the most effective approaches.

Q: Describe your Anderson Innovation Fellowship Project.

Gee: On average, women make up only 25% of engineering graduate students in the US, causing a lack of informal support networks. Pragati Muthukumar and I have created a trial program that matches female graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and professors into groups for a semesterly lunch to alleviate this issue. So far, over 65 women in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department have participated, and we hope to see the program become a staple in the department.

Q: Who is a favorite instructor you’ve had at UD?

Gee: I’m probably a little biased, but my favorite instructors are also my thesis advisors, professors Abraham Lenhoff and the late Babatunde Ogunnaike. Both taught me skills I continue to use regularly throughout my research. What sets them apart for me is that I’ve had the opportunity to learn from their leadership styles. I think that by emphasizing the growth of their students, they inspire rather than demand high-quality work.

Q: What activities do you do outside of research and classwork?

Gee: I swam competitively growing up, and have slowly been transitioning to running. It’s been an exciting learning curve, since the last time I played a land sport was back in my high school days.

Q: Explain the difference between your time as an undergraduate and graduate student.

Gee: The size and scope of the problems in graduate school are much larger. As an undergraduate student, I would have a week to complete a problem set, or three months for a project. In graduate school, I’ve been focusing on the same body of work for the last four years, and building on the work of prior graduate students going back 20 years. The original model that I’ve built my work on was published before I was born!

Q: What has been the most important skill you’ve learned in graduate school?

Gee: Something I’ve learned (and am still working on!) is how to better articulate the steps I took to address a question, the reasoning behind my approach, and the insights I’ve gained in the process of answering that question.

Q: What is your proudest accomplishment that you have achieved at UD?

Gee: Mentoring Julia Hatoum, an undergraduate chemical engineering student, during her senior honors thesis. Julia worked on improving our cardiovascular system model so that we could develop patient-specific models that capture the differences among individuals and that can be used for individualized treatment plans. It was very rewarding for me to see her understand a mathematical model with over 80 equations, then further build on the model — all while she served as student body president!

Q: What is your dream job?

Gee: I’m still trying to figure out what my dream job is, but this past summer, I did an internship in the Quantitative Systems Pharmacology group at Pfizer. Our group works on developing mathematical models of diseases and how different drugs will alter a therapeutic outcome. Much of the group’s work is used for clinical trial design, which tests whether a drug is safe and effective before it is offered to the public. For example, if we wanted to measure the efficacy of a new cold medicine, should we measure its effectiveness four hours or eight hours after taking it? I think it would be interesting to apply the skills I have developed in graduate school to drug development.

Q: What advice do you have for students who are considering graduate school?

Gee: The correct fit is really important for choosing a graduate school and a research group. By fit I don’t just mean whether the research areas are related to your interests, but also whether you can see yourself working well with the people and community.