Student to work with top medical scientists in summer internship


Sophomore Nicole Sevilla has high aspirations for her career: She hopes to one day be a medical doctor and an engineer.

And her recent acceptance into the national Exceptional Research Opportunities Program through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where she will spend her summer researching at a premier biomedical engineering laboratory, puts her well on her way to attaining her career goals.

Nicole Sevilla in FIU's Medical Photonics Laboratory

Nicole Sevilla in the Medical Photonics Laboratory at FIU

Sevilla, a biomedical engineering major, is the first student from FIU’s College of Engineering and Computing to be accepted into the prestigious EXROP program, which seeks to provide disadvantaged and minority undergraduate students with summer research experiences in the sciences. The 70 students in this year’s EXROP cohort will participate in a 10-week research internship at an HHMI lab. They also receive a $5,000 award and a housing stipend.

“Nicole is a star representative of our highly motivated, outstanding engineering students, who are passionate in the pursuit of their ideals, and who represent FIU’s commitment to excellence and service to humanity,” said Ranu Jung, the interim dean of the College of Engineering and Computing.

Sevilla is a researcher in biomedical engineering professor Jessica Ramella-Roman’s Medical Photonics Laboratory, where she’s building an imaging device that will take ultra-high resolution photos of cervical cancer cells to assist in diagnosis.

“Getting involved in this lab is actually making me see if I really want to follow neonatology as one of my professions,” Sevilla said. “I’m also considering now OB-GYN, since it also involves babies and what I’m actually doing in my research, which I’m really enjoying.”

Ramella-Roman, who nominated Sevilla for EXROP, was impressed by her initiative to expand the scope of the original project, which was started by a previous student in the lab. Sevilla is currently working to make the device non-invasive.

“One of the reasons why I nominated her was because she’s a really independent thinker,” Ramella-Roman said. “You can give her broad direction and she will pursue the work.”

Sevilla wants to design diagnostic devices for her field, so working in Ramella-Roman’s lab has allowed her to gain valuable career experience early in her studies.

“She cares a lot about us,” Sevilla said of her mentor, “and I think that’s really important, especially for professors and mentors, to actually be so involved with their students.”

Sevilla was matched with Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum at Rice University researching neonatal technologies, her top choice for the EXROP program. Richards-Kortum’s lab researches cost-effective imaging devices, so the work she will do there directly relates to what she does at FIU and what she wants to do in the future.

EXROP will offer Sevilla an opportunity to network with and learn from scientists who are leading experts in their fields. That, combined with EXROP’s research component, will play a key role in setting Sevilla’s resume and graduate school applications apart from the crowd.

“The scientists that belong to [the HHMI] consortium are extraordinary,” Ramella-Roman said. “Just the fact of being able to work with one of those investigators is an exceptional opportunity.”

Jung added: “The EXROP program will offer Nicole an outstanding opportunity to learn from the best. This is what we want—preparing the brightest minds to become innovation leaders in science and engineering.”

“It’s pretty exciting to set ground for this and to be an example,” Sevilla said of being FIU’s first engineering student to participate in EXROP. “I want to make sure I do everything correctly, and that I bring to FIU something that I gained knowledge from and can give back.”

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