Spring 2007 Newsletter

Student Credits Faculty and Friends as Key to Her Success

“What I’ve enjoyed most about Pitt’s bioengineering department is the privilege of spending the past four years with so many people who I admire and respect.”
Katelyn Lesk, senior bioengineering major

Great Mentors

Throughout her years at the University of Pittsburgh, Katelyn Lesk, a senior bioengineering major, has pursued many of the opportunities that the University has to offer. Currently, she works under Assistant Professor Tracy Cui in the Neural Tissue/Electrode Interface and Neural Tissue Engineering Lab. Lesk says, “I began working there as a sophomore and I’ve been very lucky to have worked under such great mentors. Dr. Cui has been a terrific advisor and I’ve also had the privilege of working with two wonderful graduate students, Gusphyl Justin and Erdrin Azemi Charley. I’ve learned so much from all of them.” In October, she attended the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Conference in Chicago with 10 of her classmates, where she helped Justin present research findings. “It was an amazing experience and a great honor to help my mentor,” she recalls.

Opportunities in the Campus Community

Lesk has also been very active in outreach activities on campus. For the past two-and-a-half years, she has been a member of the Freshman Engineering Leadership Team, through which she mentors freshman engineering students and helps recruit new students to the school. She is also actively involved in several organizations including the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society (of which she is currently president), the Biomedical Engineering Honor Society, Pe^x Engineering Alumni Association, and Golden Key International Honour Society, of which she is the service chair. She has been able to travel to several conferences with these organizations as well, including the Tau Beta Pi National Convention in Denver, and the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Conference in Chicago.

Supportive Faculty

She also has two work-intensive minors: materials science engineering and chemistry.

When asked how she does it all, she credits the faculty and students in the Department of Bioengineering. “What I’ve enjoyed most about Pitt’s bioengineering department is the privilege of spending the past four years with so many people who I admire and respect. The faculty members are amazing. They go above and beyond their job descriptions to help the students succeed in their endeavors, and I feel that the credit for the excellence of the bioengineering department here at Pitt is due in full to our faculty. They care so deeply about their students’ learning and really understanding the material and are always willing to give any sort of help they can provide.

“My classmates have also been one of the main reasons that my experience here has been so great. They are some of the most intelligent and down-to-earth people that I know and they motivate me on a daily basis. We are an extremely tight-knit group and everyone is always more than willing to help each other out.”

After she graduates, Lesk would like to work for a medical device company, and she’d love to stay in Pittsburgh. “Medrad and Respironics are my top choices,” she says.

The Queen of Multitasking

In her spare time (and to unwind), Lesk enjoys spending time with her friends, and calls Hemingway’s her favorite hang-out near campus—next to the gym, which she visits daily to “relieve stress.” She jokes, “My friends make fun of me because I always study while I’m on the treadmill or the elliptical machine. I’ve been dubbed the queen of multitasking and once wrote an entire paper while I was on the elliptical, although it was a little hard to decipher when I went home to type it up.” She must be deciphering her notes just fine, since she holds a 3.86 GPA in her bioengineering courses.

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