Working in Madrid

Sorry for the delay in this post! I was trying to make my way through 2 proposal deadlines in late September/early October. Now I'm trying to catch up on everything else!

So while we certainly enjoyed life in Madrid, the real reason we were there was so that I could work with my colleague, Andres Diaz Lantada at ETSI, on some new microfluidic device designs. Yes, Mom, pretty much every day I went to work at ETSI, arriving by a respectable 9:30 and often staying until 6:00. Of course, many of those days also included several coffee breaks and a crazy long Spanish lunch. But I was there to do work, and work I did.

My visit was funded by the EAGLES (Engineers as Global Leaders for Energy Sustainability) Faculty Mobility Award. For those of you who know my research, you are quite aware that it has absolutely nothing to do with Energy Sustainability. Unless you count having a healthy heart as Energy Sustainability, which apparently Drexel does because they approved my application! A colleague in mechanical engineering from ETSI, Andres Diaz Lantada, visited my lab at Drexel in June 2013. Over the past two years, we worked on several microfluidic devices for biological research together. At last, I found the time to come visit him in Madrid.

Here is the front of the ETSI building, which is actually shared with the Natural Sciences Museum in Madrid. This was taken on my first day, which coincidentally was also the first day of classes for the students!

Also in the first main hall when you enter is a giant Watt machine. Andres and I are posed next to it for scale.

We got to work right away. After an initial brainstorming session, Andres designed some microfluidic devices for my research. Then they rapid prototyped them using a stereolithography machine, and finally made some PDMS molds. Here are Andres and Pedro working to make the molds, while I helpfully watched. And took pictures.

And here is an epoxy master and some molds. We are going to use these devices to create 3D vascularized tissues, specifically fat and breast. Which I suppose are in many ways the same thing, but in our case, different. Let's hope that they work (or that my new post-doc can get them to work!). The needle in the bottom image is showing how we are going to incorporate the initial blood vessel. For size scale, these devices are about the same size as a microscope slide.

I gave a seminar on my cell mechanobiology work in English to a group of Spanish mechanical engineering faculty. Not my best work in tailoring a talk to the audience, but at least they all stayed awake.

Afterwards, we went for a traditional (aka 4 hour) Spanish lunch at a restaurant called La Hortensia in the Chueca neighborhood of Madrid. They featured bread with blue cheese (yes, even I tried the pungent blue cheese), white (Fava?) bean stews with seafood or meat, and then fried haddock. All was delicious! Here is the whole crew (faculty and students) outside La Hortensia. Andres is right next to me in the blue sweater, and there are three other faculty members and three students. See if you can figure it out!

I also taught a class on "Organ-on-a-chip" to Andres' class of 35 students. They were quite patient as they listened to my English lecture and then participated in several interactive activities (although they did at one point give me a horrified collective look as I asked them to do something completely impossible. Nothing like a challenge!). They did quite well at deciphering complex biomedical engineering papers and presenting their results to the class (again, in English). I look tall here because in Spain the lecturer is up about 2 feet on a stage!

My last commitment was an engineering fair for high school students. It was quite a production, putting our engineering fairs to shame! There were all sorts of displays there, from a falcon (which I think related to agricultural engineering) to the front part of a military jet (not sure what kind of engineering that was, but definitely cool) to a race car track. There were also quite a few 3D printers, but even still, Andres rose above the other displays and made it onto Spanish TV!

http://www.telemadrid.es/noticias/madrid/noticia/el-aprendiz-de-ingeniero-una-feria-en-upm-para-experimentar-con-tecnologia

I had a wonderful time working with Andres. He is an intelligent and kind person, who truly cares about engineering research, his students, and other people in general. I am so glad to have found him as a collaborator, and I really hope we can get one of these devices to work well so that we can keep working together!