Cel Welch grew up with an inquiring mind and a thirst for knowledge. Having always “really loved science,” by the end of middle school, they had their sights set on becoming a scientist. Now, that dream is a reality: Cel is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford, having completed their dissertation in Biomedical Engineering in December 2023. 

At Brown, Cel was a member of Anubhav Tripathi’s Lab. Their dissertation focused on physical mechanisms and devices for single-cell analysis. Cel’s work centered on cancer diagnostics, where single-cell analysis is crucial in getting the high-resolution information needed for treatment development. For their work, they earned the Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Prize and SoE Outstanding Thesis Award in 2024 and were named to the STAT Wunderkind and Forbes 30 Under 30 Science lists in 2023, among other distinctions.

Now at Stanford, Cel is working in chemical engineering with a focus on developing wearable and implantable flexible electronic devices. They received a Baker Postdoctoral Fellowship and were granted a ARPA-H Health Enabling Advancements Through Regenerative Tissue Printing (HEART) Postdoctoral Researcher award. Cel’s postdoctoral work is vastly different from what they did for their dissertation, but they enjoy that they can “keep learning” even after finishing their PhD.

“Tight-knit community:” Why pursue a PhD at Brown?

Cel was “interested in doing a PhD from a young age” simply because they knew they wanted to be a scientist and “knew a lot of scientists had PhDs.” Cel’s interests ranged across different scientific disciplines, which attracted them to BME – “about as broad of a field as you can get.”

In BME, Cel was able to “mix a bunch of different engineering disciplines and use them to solve one biological problem.” This unified their interests across the sciences. “It’s very interdisciplinary, which I think really appealed to me.”

Cel was inspired by the work they could do while collaborating with industry and medical partners at the Warren Alpert Medical School, Rhode Island Hospital, and Women and Infants Hospital. Outside of the “really good academic program and really good research,” Cel said “the students, the faculty, the staff – they’re all super welcoming and they care very deeply about each other and the bigger picture.”

At Brown, Cel knew they could be a part of a “small, tight-knit community” while pursuing groundbreaking research opportunities. In Tripathi’s Lab, Cel found a sense of community beyond science. 

With their labmates, Cel “spent a lot of time talking not just about research, but also just about life. There’s a lot of support and community there. There was not a lot of judgment. There’s not a lot of competition – just really good people that are very down to earth.”

Cel’s doctoral thesis advisor, Professor Tripathi, was central to creating such a positive lab culture. “He’s very authentic and enthusiastic. He always really believed in me – sometimes even more than I believed in myself,” they said. Outside of his passion for research, Tripathi was “also passionate about technology translation and doing good and diversity and inclusion and all these things that really matter a lot.”

“Be patient:” Meaningful research takes time

In the first year or two of Cel’s PhD program, they weren’t quite sure exactly how they would set up their project. “I was doing a lot of random stuff in the lab,” they said. 

An older labmate encouraged Cel to tinker around in the lab, even if they hadn’t received specific instructions from Tripathi. “He was like, ‘you don’t actually have to wait around for instructions. You can just go and if you have an idea, test it out.’” Cel “took that advice to heart” and started “playing around with things.” 

That was how Cel settled on the specifics of their doctoral thesis work, focusing on improved electronic and microfluidic devices for diagnostics. “Once you have this cancer tissue, it really gives you a lot of benefit to break this tissue up into these individual component cells and analyze each one individually with a single-cell sequencing approach,” they said. “It gives you a much higher resolution of the data.”

What was the challenge? “There was a big difficulty in actually clinically translating this into cancer diagnostics.” To meet the criteria for single-cell analysis, tissues from biopsies or removal surgery need to be rapidly prepared in a careful manner. In Cel’s thesis, they developed new physical mechanisms for preparing tissues for analysis and worked to design better devices for that preparation. The technologies developed in Cel’s dissertation are key progressions in cancer diagnostics and other applications.  

In the latter half of PhD work, Cel said “everything kind of comes together.” With a few hiccups along the way, Cel said “everything fell into line.” 

“For a lot of people, I think that they expect it to fall into place the first semester of their first year,” they said. “Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what is going on.” Cel encourages students to “be patient if it takes a longer time” and seek advice from their advisors and other PhD students. 

“Meaningful connections:” Service outside of the lab

While at Brown, Cel developed strong connections in and out of the BME community. Cel served as President of Brown’s Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (oSTEM) for a few years. They were in touch with the “broader STEM ecosystem, diversity ecosystem” which was a “great community.” 

Outside of Brown, Cel was involved in international conferences and scientific societies. During their PhD, they started an international nonprofit organization. Closer to home,  “I was involved in the Providence community – it was a meaningful connection,” they said. 

Cel gained some teaching experience, serving as a teaching assistant for classes and a teaching consultant at the Sheridan Center. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they used their lab and teaching knowledge to distribute COVID tests in Providence and “fill in the gaps of public education” on COVID testing.

Cel sought opportunities to give back to the greater community, whether through their involvement with Youth Pride Rhode Island or Mentor Rhode Island, where they mentored “a lot of high school students” in Providence. 

“Just go for it:” Cel’s reflections on their PhD journey

For students who aren’t sure whether or not to pursue a PhD, Cel says to “just go for it, even if you think you’re not good enough. You will never really know unless you try.” Earlier in Cel’s life, they didn’t “really feel very smart.” Later, they realized that success in research is about more than “being good on paper” – it takes “resilience, creativity, passion.” 

For Cel, “everything worked out in the end.” While they wish they had “collaborated and reached out to more people” earlier in their PhD journey, the pieces eventually fell into place. 

To current PhD students, Cel said they shouldn’t be afraid to “reach out to people and ask for help. If someone inspires you – whether that’s a professor or another grad student or somebody in industry – reach out to them and, worst case scenario, they’re not going to respond.” 

On top of reaching out to people, Cel encourages students to connect with individual funding opportunities. “Everything builds on your past, so the more track record of funding you have, the better you look,” they said. “Even if you don’t end up getting the award, you should sit down and take some time to try.”

Now, Cel is using the skills they gained throughout their PhD and applying them to “a completely different subject matter” in their postdoctoral work. “You can do something that’s completely different as long as you have a good conceptual framework,” they said. 

Their postdoctoral work at Stanford focuses on electronic device fabrication and flexible electronics. “It’s a very big collaborative project team,” they said. “It’s a lot of fun and it’s definitely a lot of learning.”