Cliff T. Wofford STEM Scholarship

My interest in STEM started when I was younger, stemming from pop culture and personal experiences. The two things I loved doing when I was a kid were building legos and watching superhero movies. My favorite part about building legos was the ability to use my imagination to build unique and creative sets. This was the earliest instance where I knew I wanted to pursue a career doing something innovative and creative, as building legos was to me at the time. Watching superhero movies as a kid was an early indication of my wanting to go into a career involving the applications of science and technology. My favorite movies to watch were the Dark Knight Trilogy and Iron Man. The plot of these movies emphasizes the influence that a regular person can have just by applying science and technology to help others. Batman engineered an underground cave to serve as his base of intelligence for fighting crime. Along with this, the movie highlighted the technology used by Batman when fighting different bad guys, for example when he had his suit modified to be more agile when fighting a lot of people at once. The most relevant superhero to what I want to do as a career after college is Iron Man, also known as Tony Stark. Stark was a natural scientist and engineer, doing things like building a device to stop a tumor from reaching his heart, or discovering a new element as an energy source for his suit. I was born with a birth defect called amniotic band syndrome, which is where fibrous bands in the womb wrap around and can cut off the circulation to body parts. Due to this, I lost significant portions of four of my fingers. Though I cannot fully relate to the physical challenges that losing body parts can have on those who have lost an arm or a leg, I can relate to the mental woes that one can have when living with something like this. My journey to becoming more self-confident was a difficult one, but it was in overcoming my insecurity that I realized that a defining characteristic of my life is my determination to work hard. Like Stark using his personal heart affliction to influence his drive to make super suits, I use my personal experience to guide my contribution to helping those with whatever medical problem they might have. These things are what influenced me to want to pursue a career in STEM. Currently, I am pursuing a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, with the goal to earn an MD-Ph.D. or a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. I want to earn at least Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in order to be exceptionally qualified to apply those skills to create and do research in advanced prosthetic devices to better help those in need to have a better range of motion and an improved ability to function as if the prosthetic was the biological appendage, limb, etc. I believe that current commercial prosthetics just fulfill the missing body part as a placeholder, rather than giving the person the same range of motion and sensory benefits that it should. I want to create prosthetics that can move as efficiently as their biological counterparts can. I want to accomplish this by making the prosthetic interface compatible with electrical signals from the brain. Once I achieve this, I want to advance a wider range of medical devices like surgical tools, imaging devices, and other things like that.

I am a sophomore Dean’s list, out of state student studying Biomedical engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. I want to improve medical devices, supplying nurses and doctors with nothing less than the best equipment. After completion of my undergraduate journey, I aspire to obtain a graduate degree. I am a member of 4 clubs at North Carolina A&T State University: National Society of Black Engineers, Biomedical Engineering Society, Deep South Aggies, and Natural and Proud Sistas. Moreover, I have always been captivated with robots and how they could impact and improve the daily works of society. Since the beginning of my junior year of high school I have been trying to build on my engineering knowledge. I participated in The Young Women In Science Investigation Program partnered with The University of Texas at Dallas for two consecutive years, specifically my junior and senior years of high school. During my junior year of high school in YWISE, I worked amongst a team to contribute to the building of a submersible drone that could maneuver from various underwater locations. The objective of the drone benefits research in underwater locations that are not feasible to physically be present in or could not be seen by the human eye. I was astonished at the outcome and checkpoints of the project, I came to realize that this is what my career will be composed of and I love it. During my senior year, I worked with another team to experiment with the elastocaloric effect, the expanding and contracting of rubber bands to cool down objects through conduction. A small prototype refrigerator was developed with this effect to display an alternative refrigeration system without the use of pollutants present in modern day refrigerators. Correspondingly, this past summer I interned with the University of California Irvine-Alabama A&M University Pathways to Accelerating and Computing Engineering(UCI-AAMU PACE) program. I researched the effects of the Picasso method, blindly unmixing overlapping fluorophore proteins. I used mixed images to determine the outcome of separate individual images. This research is beneficial in Biomedical Engineering research when determining cell identification. In conclusion, due to my previous experience in the STEM academy, YWISE program, and UCI-AAMU PACE program has made me more confident in pursuing an engineering degree and aided in the incline of my presentation skills. My research in STEM, YWISE, and UCI-AAMU PACE has assisted in my preparation for graduate school, but there is still a lot for me to learn. I hope I will be honored with the Cliff T. Wofford STEM Scholarship, so that I can continue my undergraduate studies and accomplish my career aspirations.