The lab serves as project advisors for the Cornell University College of Engineering’s Curie Program. This week-long event brings 30 high-school girls that are interested in engineering to Cornell to learn more about engineering applications through daily lectures and through an intense lab research-oriented project that meets daily for six hours, which the lab ran. The student projects focused on the use of optical techniques to characterize blood flow and oxygenation in tissue, providing students with an exposure to optics, to medically-relevant physiology, and giving them a sense of the importance of high-quality medical diagnostics. The students were broken into teams of five, with each team using a different optical technique to measure blood perfusion parameters. After helping the students achieve a basic understanding of a particular optical imaging method, we had them use this method to measure changes in blood oxygenation or flow in their own fingers in experiments of their own design. For example, students looked at how oxygenation changes when blood flow is reduced by a blood pressure cuff and at how blood flow changes when the skin is heated, or cooled, or lightly abraded. While we strove to ensure that students formed testable hypothesis and took systematic data to check their ideas, we did not prescribe the experiments they do, making this a very inquiry-driven experience. These inquiry-driven laboratory exercises provided students with an introduction to quantitative analysis of data and an understanding of the material properties that determine color and the basic optics of imaging. In addition, they learned the basic physiology of the circulatory system and of oxygen delivery and utilization by tissue. In informal discussions, we also discussed disease states, such as peripheral limb ischemia and post-surgical monitoring, where the techniques used by the students would be useful in medical care. At the end of the week, students gave short talks on their results. The exploratory, inquiry-driven nature of the laboratory exercises, coupled with the emphasis on quantification and hypothesis testing showed students how the scientific process works and gave them a sense of science as a dynamic process for discovery, not just a collection of static facts and figures.
Outreach
Reaching out
Learning optics to understand scientific discovery.
The world we live in is surrounded by light. Everyday light enables us to go about our daily routines. However there is more to light than meets the eye. We have developed activities for grade-school and middle-school student that teach basic principles of light and optics. More importantly, these activities teach the process of science through inquiry-driven activities. We use a kit developed by the Optical Society of America to teach a basic understanding of light and optical principles, including making images and microscopes. We also have student conduct experiments that introduce the concept of telecommunications, a subject that has and will continue to significantly affect the world, in an effort to make science seem more relevant. The goal of this course is to get students excited and interested in a concept that has limitless applications and how something we are exposed to everyday is being used to study some of today’s most pressing problems.