A team effort to find a new way to treat sepsis has provided myriad hands-on opportunities for undergraduate and graduate bioengineering students at Oregon State. They’ve made vital contributions to the research and advanced their careers.
“This is such a large project that we’ve probably had a couple dozen or more students involved in recent years,” says Joe McGuire, professor and head of the School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering.
Research in McGuire’s lab led a graduate student to a doctoral program at the University of Delaware and an undergraduate to a job with a biomedical company in Bend. And it propelled Marsha Lampi, a Portland track star who received her OSU bachelor’s degree in 2012, to a doctoral program in biomedical engineering at Cornell University.
“I was awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Sloan Foundation,” says Lampi. “My research with Dr. McGuire, particularly the opportunity to have a first-author publication from my undergraduate research, was pivotal in making me competitive for these fellowships.”
At OSU, Lampi helped define how peptides can remove toxins from blood. At Cornell, she studies the effect of arterial stiffening, which occurs naturally with aging, on the formation of fatty deposits on artery walls.
She isn’t sure yet where her career will end, but it’s clear where it began.
