She’s found a way to pursue both, having earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and now working toward a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Maryland.
“I figured that biomedical engineering, bioengineering in general, was such a great way to combine my two passions,” says Ramirez. “It’s just really cool to be able to solve a problem within your body using engineering solutions.”
The problem Ramirez’s doctoral research is looking into has to do with structural changes to lymph nodes in the human body and how such changes relate to the functionality of the overall immune system.
“When you get really sick, they get inflamed, your lymph nodes expand, and the structure of your lymph node actually changes,” she explains. “As you age, a lot of our lymph nodes have gotten through a lot of sicknesses. They’ve been inflamed a bunch of times, so they’ll get really stiff. If you [look at] old people or even very sick people, they don’t have very great immune systems. We are kind of hypothesizing that a lot of it has to do with the overall structural changes.”
To do this work, she’s looking outside of UMD to learn new techniques that even people in her own lab are not familiar with, says Ramirez’s dissertation advisor, Dr. Katharina Maisel, an assistant professor in UMD’s Fischell Department of Bioengineering.
Maisel calls the fifth year Ph.D. candidate a driven researcher and a mentor for others in the lab.
