This summer I am honored to be working in Dr. George Truskey’s Biomedical Engineering lab. Dr. Truskey received a Bachelor’s Degree in Bioengineering at University of Pennsylvania. He was planning on being pre-med and majoring in Chemistry when he discovered bioengineering by accident. His counselor suggested that he should look into chemical engineering, but he didn’t know what engineering really was at the time because no one in his family was an engineer. When he started researching chemical engineering, he came across bioengineering and thought it sounded really interesting. Dr. Truskey started working in a lab in the physiology department and had a really supportive mentor. She was just starting out as a faculty member, so they helped each other out a great deal. She gave him a lot of independence as they worked on their project about transport ions in red blood cells. During his undergraduate years, Truskey became very interested in the idea of becoming a faculty member and working on research projects. He was inspired to work on research problems and push the frontiers of knowledge.
Dr. Truskey then went on to get his PhD at MIT. MIT didn’t have bioengineering, but many people were still working on bioengineering projects anyway, and he was able to write a Biomedical Engineering thesis. At first he was interested in a project on diabetes, but there were no openings. He ended up joining another lab working on understanding how proteins get into arteries and the formation of atherosclerosis. This research ended up setting the direction for his research since then. He started with studying how physical forces transport processes affect biological responses, then how cells interact with biomaterials, and the on to tissue engineering. After Dr. Truskey earned his Ph. D, he worked at Tuffs University for two years before coming to Duke 1987. He now oversees many projects working on tissue engineered blood vessels and muscles to help test drugs and come up with the best possible treatments for diseases such as type II Diabetes and Progeria. Dr. Truskey hasn’t worked in the lab in a long time, but he still likes talking about all the results. He meets with all the grad students once a week to hear about their projects and help them troubleshoot. He really enjoys working with math and helping his students figure out algorithms to aid with their experiments. He spends his days editing papers, working on getting grants, teaching, and keeping up with the literature. New techniques are always being developed, and he relies on his students to implement them.
Dr. Truskey is passionate about science because he gets to ask questions that no one’s ever asked before, so the results are always somewhat unexpected. “We’ve worked on taking the research results and trying to apply them in practical ways that would be beneficial. It’s always nice to see that your work can have some impact,” said Truskey. He wishes that research would go faster, but he thinks the process works well. He enjoys working with graduate and undergraduate students, training them and letting them experience science and grow as a result of that. “A lot of research is trying to make things work properly and trying to do something that no one’s ever done before. It takes a lot to figure out how to do things right and to get data that makes sense,” said Truskey. There have been experiments that his lab has done that they didn’t fully understand at the time. They asked students to repeat them and repeat them and they kept coming out the same, but they didn’t know why. Sometimes you perform the project incorrectly and sometimes you just have the wrong understanding. Research is exciting because you can learn new things, but there is also a lot of repeating of experiments and making sure you have the right controls. Repeating experiments is very important for validating results. Dr. Truskey’s advice to those just starting out in the world of research is to be curious. He says asking questions, coming up with ideas, and trying new things are the best ways to learn and sometimes even lead to amazing new discoveries.
