Unlike most of the PIs my fellow BSURFers have, Dr. Viventi has always been an engineer at heart. He studied Electrical Engineering as an undergraduate at Princeton, where he did activities such as robotics and worked with automated vehicles to further his interests in electronics. As soon as he graduated, Dr. Viventi worked a successful wireless start up company.
Later in his life, Dr. Viventi decided that he wanted to go to graduate school in Biomedical Engineering. He wanted to use his knowledge of electronics and engineering and apply it to the field of medicine to solve various types of medical problems. He studied BME at Penn, where he studied topics such as biology and neuroscience for the first time since high school! In 2011, he became a professor at NYU, where he first started his work in translational neuroengineering designing active electrodes that could be used to work with the brain. He figured that this type of work would help us understand more about neuroscience and could be used to treat different types of neurological diseases in the future. In January of 2015, he moved to Duke University to continue his work in the field as a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Viventi says that his favorite part about science is that he gets to tackle new and interesting problems. He likes to be able to build devices and apply his knowledge to medicine in order to find solutions that could be very beneficial to the world. He has had good experiences in teaching as well, where he has taught courses in signal processing, circuits, and intro to medical devices.
Overall, I am very inspired by Dr. Viventi’s passion for electronics and its application in the medical field. To me, being able to tackle problems in medicine using engineering methods is very exciting and is the reason I am a BME student here at Duke. I am very glad that I get to work under him this summer, and I hope to learn more about the field and research through work in his lab.
Side Note: surprisingly, Dr. Viventi hasn’t had too many issues with disasters that have happened in the laboratory (I hope I do not jinx this for him). The worst that has happened was when he was a professor at NYU, where he had to move his equipment around the different campuses located in different parts of New York City, often resulting in broken devices. This doesn’t happen at Duke, as the devices used in lab do not have to travel very far in experiments that are conducted.
You are in a very good place where you can bring a bunch of fields together which helps progress medicine in this case much further than, say, biology alone, and I think Dr. Viventi imparted that a bit!