[MUSIC] My name is Brendan Harley.

I'm an assistant professor

in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department
at the University of Illinois. I'm also involved in
the regenerative biology and tissue engineering theme here at
the Institute for Genomic Biology. My research is in biomaterials and
digital engineering. So we try to design materials that can
be implanted in the body to help heal injuries. We're also interested in making
materials
that you could grow cells in outside of the body to ask questions about
how diseases progress and how we can treat them. If I really had to describe
my research to someone new, what we really think about is changing
the way people practice medicine. And there is a lot of opportunities for people
outside of the standard
medical field to make an impact. And so part of the time we joke that
some of the work we're doing is in the realm of thinking about
what you do in Star Trek. Where all of a sudden,
they'd come up to you. You have some sort of injury and
there'd be a magical fix. And we realize that's not happening
next year or five years from now or ten years from now. But really thinking about
how do you
re-address the idea of being sick and treating injuries. And there's a lot of
stuff that we do there. And so really we're trying to envision
the next generation of medicine. The reason I'm really
interested in science and the bio side is that I always
did want to be an engineer, is that I love playing with LEGOs and
models and all these things. And when I was 17 I was
diagnosed with leukemia. And I spent a year in the hospital,
part of the Harvard Medical School system being treated for leukemia with chemo and
radiation and a bone marrow transplant and was fascinated by how the biology
could have worked to save my life. And the other thing being
in a teaching hospital, when your temperature is being taken by
the resident, your temperature is actually being taken about 12 times by the
resident
and all the interns following them around. And being 17, I was in a adult hospital.
I was in hospital and I was the youngest
person on the floor by 20 or 30 years until I was the closest
in age to all the doctors. So in their off time they'd
hang out in my room and we'd talk about what they did for
college, what they did for majors, what they did in terms of research and
how that impacted their medical careers. And I was always planning to go to
an engineering focused university and do the hardcore science. And I went to
Harvard. I had a really good application essay
[LAUGH] Being in the hospital when I was applying, but the reality is that being
in a liberal arts environment and being surrounded by people with many different
interests, and seeing the integration of biology, and medicine, and engineering
was a really transformative thing. And that's really what got me thinking
about doing that as a career, is seeing the way that an educator could
impact people at the university in a more liberal arts environment and so
it's not by accident I'm in a place has a strong history of research and a strong
history of liberal arts education. I mean I wouldn't be here without
having gone through that. I mean I'll be doing a very different
job If I hadn't gone through all those experiences and seeing about a third of my
research is
in the area of bone marrow transplants. I would have never understood the patient
side of a lot of those things without having the chance to be a patient. Understand
what that is like and then you get a better sense of how
you might be able to contribute. And those things are a real
part of how we do sciences is understanding the side of the patient,
understanding the science. How do you make an impact? It's not just understanding
all
the mechanism in the sterile room, it's really, the things that we work on
in bioengineering are helping patients. And so, if you don't understand
what the patient is going through, what the psychology is behind,
what's going on, we are not curing cancer in a vacuum,
we are actually curing cancer for a patient and
those things are important to understand. [MUSIC]