Genevieve Brown
	2010
	Bioengineering
	Bone Bioengineering Laboratory Department of Biomedical Engineering Columbia University
	Graduate Research Assistant

What do you do in your current position?At the Bone Bioengineering Laboratory, students with diverse educational backgrounds work together to study bone biomechanics from many different perspectives. We have projects ranging from cell biology studies, finite element analyses for fracture mechanics, and clinical imaging analysis. In my research, I study molecular pathways critical in bone mechanotransduction - how bone cells sense the presence or absence of physiological forces and respond by changing their activity. My goal is to gain a better scientific understanding of how these pathways are regulated in healthy bone tissue so we can learn how they are disrupted by diseases like osteoporosis.

How has your PSU engineering education/experiences helped to get you where you are today? I was really compelled to study bioengineering at Penn State when the former department chair told me that if I came to PSU, my money would fund my education and experiences, whereas other schools put a lot of money into their graduate students and you don't always get an even return. I am happy to say that this was absolutely true! I feel so fortunate to have been involved in research and other activities at Penn State that have really shaped me and my career.

I was accepted into the McNair Scholars Program at the beginning of my sophomore year, and that really propelled me to pursue research and shape my experiences to prepare me for graduate school. The McNair program offers professional development and research opportunities to first-generation, low-income college students to prepare them for advanced degrees. I began working on an interdisciplinary research project (with professors from the Bioengineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology departments) and stayed with that project for the rest of my time at Penn State.

Around the same time, I took CAS with Melissa and found it really exciting to get over my nerves and present technical material in a way that made sense for both the speaker and the audience to enjoy and understand. Then, as an Engineering Ambassador, I got to use what I learned and studied at Penn State to reach out to younger kids and spark their interest in science and engineering, and I found that this helped me present my own research at conferences as well. Taken all together, these experiences helped me realize that my passion lies in researching new questions and sharing that knowledge with the scientific community, so now I am working towards my Ph.D.!

How has your experience as an EA impacted your professional life so far? How do I even start!? Being an EA and working closely with Melissa and Michael Alley helped me improve my communication skills, both written and verbal. I was able to present my research at national conferences, write compelling graduate school applications, and apply for government funding. I was awarded a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship and accepted into many programs, so being an EA gave me many options. This was great, because both my husband and I were graduating from Penn State at the same time, and what could have been a stressful transition for both of us went relatively smoothly.