Classes start up for me tomorrow with a class in Tissue Engineering and another one on Drug Delivery. Since I don’t know much about either one, they should be interesting. Both classes are on Tuesday/Thursday this semester.
Stuff I used to know
Classes have been going on for about 3 weeks now, and it hasn’t been too bad so far. BioE 846 (Biomedical Basis for Engineered Replacement) has turned out to be essentially an intro physiology course and BioE 820 (Biomechanics) has just been math review so far (all about tensors).
Basically I’ve been resurrecting a bunch of stuff I learned back in undergrad and grad school oh so many years ago.
Hopefully things will get more interesting soon.
PhD Year 2
Starting off the first semester of my second year next week.
On the schedule for this year is Structural Biomechanics (BioE 820), Biomedical Basis for Engineered Replacement (BioE 846) and the weekly seminar class (BioE 800).
Going to be a busy semester coming up I think.
PhD Year 1
Wrote the final exam in my Biotransport class today, finishing off the first year of my PhD.
Only about 4 or 5 more to go.
For the next few months all I have to think about now are just work and research. I don’t expect things to get less busy over the summer.
Time to figure out how to build an MPI enabled version of MCNP. Should be fun.
Every time I think about that, I hear the Emperor saying “Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational workstation”.
Yeah, I’m that nerdy.
Searching for a PhD project
The Clemson Bioengineering department normally wants PhD students to come up with a proposal and do the qualifying exam within 18 months of starting. Since my plan is to do course work and research concurrently, I need to come up with something sooner than that.
I’ve been rolling around a few possible areas in my head and doing some literature searching to see what’s been done.
One obvious area, given our brand-new-state-of-the-art-only-3-in-the-US dual source CT scanner, is dual energy CT. There’s been some work doing tissue discrimination and characterization using dual energy CT, but not too much. I could also spend some time studying some of the dosimetry characteristics of doing dual energy CT.
Another area that I would like to explore is phase contrast imaging, although that generally requires a synchrotron source and fairly specialized detectors. Plus I’m not sure that would fit in with the Bioengineering group very well.
There’s another idea about CT dosimetry that has been rolling around in my brain for quite a while now, but it’s going to take a fair bit of work to flesh out properly and see how feasible it is. If I can take this concept, formalize it, test its validity and make it easy to implement, it could potentially change the way patient radiation doses are determined by the CT scanner.
That would be a lot to do for a PhD, but even if I only accomplished half of it, it would be a big thing.