After being informed of the opportunity to go, I eagerly submitted my application to present a poster at this year’s 6th annual NEW.Mech conference hosted by Boston University on October 2nd. I was especially intrigued to see the key note speaker Prof. Katherine Zhang’s presentation on Arterial Mechanobiology. I anticipated it would investigate the dynamics of arteries as arising from the physics of the components of arteries, rather than the qualitative descriptions I’d been given in biology classes. Further I knew attending NEW.Mech would afford me the chance to present a poster on my work. While presenting my work at this year’s GRC on liquid crystals, I realized that presenting posters on work not only raises awareness of one’s work, but provides the insightful questions of expert scientists seeing your work for the first time and invites collaboration with researchers who are trying to solve similar problems.
Shortly after my application was accepted, I attended along with Chris Burke and Prof. Tim Atherton and was exceedingly impressed by the presentations. The presentations focused on either the exploration of poorly understood mechanical behavior in systems, or using cutting edge mechanics theory to create new technology. An example of the former type of presentation was Professor Zhang’s. Her groups research showed how arteries, primarily composed of flexible elastin fibers and rigid collagen form networks, as well as how those networks change when exposed to glucose, and how they change as humans age. Similarly Shengchen Liu, using computational simulations, showed that tumors can be detected through analyzing the response of external skin to small amounts of pressure. On more of the engineering side, Mahdi Takaffoli presented on his group’s results in combining compounds which change color under mechanical stress with elastomers to create surfaces which can predictably change color, similar to the skin of octopi.
Between the presentations, besides getting some coffee, I presented a poster of my work and received a goodly deal of helpful questions. My poster, though very general, provoked specific questions from an audience composed of many other physicists familiar with computational modeling. The questions I was asked about my model were much more specific than at the Gordon Conference I attended earlier this summer, at which many chemists and experimentalists were present. One of the audience members was sufficiently intrigued that he politely asked that I email him a copy of my senior thesis once it is completed.
Overall this year’s NEW.Mech conference impressed upon me not only the potential benefits to medicine from further study of the nuances of mechanics, but the extent to which I enjoy the work related to the field. During the course of my early physics education at Tufts I had only ever seen physics as series of balls, charges and pulleys. Though personally fascinating, I had persistently been concerned as to whether understanding such abstract systems could benefit those around me. I was surprised and moved by the focus of the conference on the application of new physics models to understand not only how human bodies function, but how to engineer ways detect problems within them. Further I enjoyed immensely sharing my research to a polite, knowledgeable and insatiably curious audience.
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