Faces of BME - Solumtobechukwu Ayadiuno

What inspired you to pursue a graduate degree in engineering, and what sparked your interest in the field of biomedical engineering?

I always thought I wanted to be a doctor growing up. I knew I wanted to help people and contribute positively to the world. I knew I wanted to do this in a way that played to my strengths and interests in human biology, math, and physics. I thought that being a medical doctor was the best way to achieve this. I even went into my undergraduate degree of biomedical engineering thinking of it as a stepping stone to medical school, a way to combine my love of human biology and math, but ultimately not the final goal. It wasn’t until my second year of my undergraduate degree as my learning became more specialized that I realized that I was deeply mistaken. My studies were making it clear to me that I had conflated being a doctor with being a bioengineer. As I learned about the human body, the biomechanics of injury, and what went into the design of medical devices and biopharmaceuticals, I realized that what I thought was the work of doctors was in fact the work of biomedical engineers. This didn’t change any of the goals I dreamed of achieving as a little girl, but it did mean that the path of biomedical bioengineering was the way to get me there.

In my final year I found myself wrestling with the idea of a course-based master’s program or a research-based one. A conversation with one of my professors helped me realize that course-based master’s programs are focused on deepening existing knowledge, whereas research-based master’s are about being on the forefront of cutting-edge developments in the field. Reflecting on the reasons behind my desire to attend grad school made it obvious that a course-based master’s wasn’t the way to go. The field of bioengineering is still so new, especially cell-based medicine, with so many interesting and worthwhile avenues to pursue that for me it really only made sense to pursue a research-based master’s program such as the one you offer here.

What previous achievements are you most proud of? 

Best capstone group

• As a part of my Capstone team, the only all women team completing a capstone that year in the school of biomedical engineering, I helped with the developing, testing, and validating of a test rig for FORM swim to validate a novel algorithm that tracks the head movement of the swimmer in the pitch and roll directions. The work done on this project got my team a spotlight by UBC engineering, as well as an award based on faculty evaluation of our final project pitch.

Graduated from my undergrad

• I graduated from my undergrad having achieved deans honor list every term of every year (achieving a minimum of 80% average for each term). I managed to keep up this average while participating in extracurriculars such as intramural basketball, membership in the black student union, and running a small hair braiding business for black students on campus with my friend.

Can you tell us about your research and the impact you hope it will have?

I am in the Gilbert Lab which focuses primarily on muscle development. My project specifically focuses on the development of muscle stem cells. During skeletal muscle development, Pax7+ myogenic progenitor cells (MPCs) proliferate to build all the muscle we need. Once all our muscle is established a subset of MPCs mature and enter a cell-cycle arrested state called “quiescence” which helps these Pax7+ muscle stem cells (MuSCs) preserve their stem cell properties and prevent exhaustion, throughout adulthood. While, it is currently possible to direct the differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) toward MPCs in 2D culture, they remain halted in a proliferative, fetal-like developmental stage. Strategies to push human MPCs to a quiescent, adult-like MuSC fate are needed to support regenerative medicine applications and disease modelling. To date, the maturation of hiPSC-derived MPCs to the adult MuSC state has only been achieved through transplantation into mature adult tissue and tissue-like muscle scaffolds (like the biomimetic skeletal muscle tissue platform, mini-IDLE, developed by the Gilbert Lab), suggesting cues from homeostatic muscle drive this development process. My research aims to explore the hypothesis that multinucleated muscle cells within adult skeletal muscle tissue produces a factor, or factors, that induces hiPSC-derived muscle stem cells to undergo developmental maturation and adopt a quiescent, adult-like MuSC fate. This work aims to deepen our understanding of regulators driving MuSC maturation and quiescence during development. Furthermore, through developing a means to create a large population of adult like MuSCs it opens the door for regenerative medicine to harness the use of mature adultlike MuSCs for therapies targeting muscular disfunction due to disease as well as aging.

What does it mean to be a black engineer?

I have constantly been told from a young age, from almost every avenue that I would need to work twice as hard as so many of my classmates, colleagues, and friends simply because of two things: the colour of my skin and my gender. To talk about what it’s like to be a black engineer in my experience, I also need to speak on what it is to be a woman in engineering, because the reality is that it’s difficult to separate the two. When presenting my thoughts and ideas in public spaces I often feel the need to think about not only the content of what I say but also the manner in which I present, the tone of my voice, the accompanying facial expressions, my appearance and how to cater these factors to allow people to be more receptive to my thoughts. It’s a constant battle, tiptoeing around landmines to prove to those who doubt you and to yourself that you not only belong in a room, but you are contributing meaningfully to it.

I recently came across a word that highlights a large part of my experience as a black engineer, trained in Canada.

Monachopsis – The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, even if everything around you seems fine. It’s a sense of not quite fitting in or being disconnected, even in a familiar environment

As I’m often surrounded by people who have very different lived experiences to my own but who can relate to each other. It was not uncommon for me to walk into a room and notice that I was the only woman, less uncommon to find myself being the only black individual, and even less uncommon being the only black woman. They have other people in the room that can deeply understand their views, their ideas, and their interests. Often, you’re not being willfully left out and it’s not a constant feeling, but it’s as if only certain parts and aspects of you are accepted.

That being said, it’s also incredibly empowering to remember that despite everything, despite the biases you have to face, you have made it where you are. And by virtue of being where you are you are making it easier for others after you to be where you are. Remembering this often helps ease some of the discomfort of monachopsis, because in a sense you are helping to create your own community, I can’t help but feel deeply connected to all the female Black engineers who came before me and those that will come after me.

What advice would you give to younger students considering a career in engineering? 

Advice that I would give younger students considering a career in engineering is to incorporate user centred inclusive design early into their career. While it’s almost obvious that as engineers we should strive to centre the end users of our designs in the development and implementation of said designs, I think it’s very easy to get lost in your own desire to make a large impact that the voices of the people you are aiming to help can fade into the background. The wants and needs of end users are often overlooked and much simpler than the problems we decide need attention. I think it’s very important to listen to the entire demographic of individuals who’s lives you aim to impact, as every new person you speak to has lived experiences that affect how they see the world in a way you never will, so they can contribute to the design process in a way you alone cannot.