Meet the Team: Emma

So I am another team member and Dimitra has asked me to introduce myself on the blog. My name is Emma and I am a Biomedical Engineer researching prosthetic limbs at Newcastle University. I come from Geelong, a city near the beginning of the breathtakingly beautiful great ocean road in Australia. So you might be wondering what made me decide to move to the cold north east. I will start from the beginning.

As chance would have it when I was in high school I was made to enter all of the subjects I was studying into a computer for it to spit out a very long list of careers I could end up choosing. I made it to ‘B’ biomedical engineer, and then didn’t continue reading the rest of the list. I don’t think I really knew what a biomedical engineer did back then, and I had never considered engineering before that point. I had toyed with the idea of being a vet, a doctor, a park ranger, and an astronomer.

I actually kept the dream of becoming an astronomer alive for as long as possible, studying astronomy as an elective in my first year of university. But, I was always interested in medicine and I dreamt of curing cancer. I thought that maybe engineering would offer a different perspective, something that traditional medicine may have missed. So I applied to study Biomedical Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne. While I have never actually ended up investigating cures for cancer, I have found that engineering is an important component of medicine. I have also realised that many people from many different backgrounds need to work together to come up with solutions to medical mysteries.

Near the end of my Bachelor degree, Monash University ending up getting funding to develop a Bionic eye, a prosthetic for someone who is blind. The idea of being able to tap into the brain, so that someone who had lost the ability to see would be able to see again excited me. I signed up to do a PhD project with them, and I have not looked back.

At the end of my PhD I wanted to keep learning about prosthetics that interface with the brain, but I needed to move, learn more from different people. I applied for a post-doc in Newcastle and moved here in 2015. Now I research how to provide sensory feedback to prosthetic hand users. Surprisingly, the problems faced in sensory feedback are very similar to those in a bionic eye. We still need to tap into the nervous system to provide a person with information they do not have.

Sensory feedback is important in controlling a prosthetic hand! Have you ever tried to tie your shoelaces after being out in the cold? You can’t do it until your hands have warmed up. If this is something you would like to learn more about, come talk to me at the exhibition.