"I attribute the fact that I'm here to the way Brown students faces get when they talk about what they study," says Colette Bare '19.  "Their eyes light up because they're so passionate about it." After growing up outside of Chicago, she applied to college uncertain if she wanted to study engineering.  "I applied to a big range of schools and didn't really know what I wanted, but when I came to ADOCH, I fell in love with Brown. I also chose Brown because I thought I wanted to study engineering but I wasn't really sure - I mean, who knows much about engineering before undergrad?  I had always been told by teachers that because I liked math and science I might like engineering."

The Open Curriculum allowed Bare to explore a variety of interests and fields before settling on BME.  "Coming to BME was a journey. At various points I thought I was going to be every other kind of engineering," she says.  "I declared electrical [engineering] originally, but I realized I kept taking biology classes and I wanted to go to medical school."

She has spent the past two years taking pre-med requirements, and now plans to pursue a joint MD-PhD program following a gap year.  Of her decision, she says: "I really like research and being in the lab, but I love being with people and talking with people. I thought my personal gifts might be lost in a career purely focused on research.  I wanted something to tie me to the rest of the world in a real way." MD-PhD programs usually begin with two years of medical school, followed by the research portion of the PhD and finishing with clinical work and applications to complete the medical degree.  "I'd like to do the classic physician-scientist route and pursue a career mostly in BME research with a couple days a week in the clinic," she says. "I'm really interested in cardiology and internal medicine.”

Her interest in the cardiovascular system grew out of taking classes like Physiology and Cardiovascular Engineering at Brown, as well as a research fellowship after her sophomore year at a cardiovascular center in Michigan.  Once Bare returned to Brown, she joined Professor Kareen Coulombe's lab studying cardiac tissue engineering. She also took Cardiovascular Engineering with Professor Coulombe during the spring semester. She says it has been her favorite class at Brown so far.  "The final project was a scientific review of the literature and gave me a good opportunity to get an overview of the field I'm interested in and some background on the project I'd be working on this summer. I also enjoyed learning more about cardiovascular physiology and pathophysiology."  

She is currently working on a project to create blood vessels in engineered cardiac tissue.  "One of the great challenges in the field is scaling up engineered tissues because cells in the middle die when they don't get oxygen," she says.  "We are working on creating a pump to push nutrients through and deliver oxygen through vessels to cells at the middle of the tissue." The first priority is building the bioreactor and pump system.  She hopes to continue work for her senior thesis by running in vitro experiments to validate the model and test different vessel geometries.

Despite her strong interest in BME, Bare has not restricted herself to classes in the engineering school.  "I took a seminar on North African history from the colonial period to present. I love reading and writing and I want to do more of it," she says.  "I really want to continue to develop my skills in critical thinking, reading and writing." She works with Brown's Model UN organization and has traveled and competed with the team.  Last spring, she ran their college conference and will be in charge of the high school conference in the fall, where 900 students visit Brown to compete. "It's really fun because it's mostly political science and [international relations] students and we get to just talk about the world and its issues.  It feels like the opposite of class."

Bare has taken a nonlinear path through engineering, but she has few regrets.  "I would say that I wish I had known I wanted to be pre-med or that I wanted to study biomedical engineering, but also part of the beauty of being at Brown and part of why I came here is that I didn't know and could explore different fields," she says.  "Even though certainty from day one would have been great for taking courses in the perfect order, I also in not knowing have built a winding path with lots of great relationships with professors and peers. I can't say it's been a perfect experience, but I wouldn't change much of anything."