HOUGHTON, Mich. (WZMQ) – Research students and professors on Michigan Technological University’s campus are seeing a long-awaited project now open for use.
Friday morning marked a new start in research for MTU, with the brand new over $50 million H-STEM research facility, the newest addition to the Husky campus. This allows undergraduates and graduates the ability to further their research and also allows for a lot of collaboration with a variety of areas of study.
“Up to this point we have been spread on campus behind walls and not a lot people knew that a lot of health research and innovation was happening at Michigan Tech,” commented Director of Health and Research Insititute Caryn Heldt.
The building construction was aimed at keeping the building as open as possible, almost every lab from genetic and anatomy research to exercise sciences are built with just glass walls to keep labs inviting to other students or professors.
“We can look over here to actually locate that on a CT, and then take a look at that stomach again and look under the microscope so then you can also look at the individual cells as well,” commented Biological Sciences Travis Wakeham.
This anatomy projector, allows MTU researchers to upload various ct scans of people to build their entire anatomy, from the muscle fibers to the whole nervous system.
“All the individual lymph nodes and all the major blood vessels and even taking that a step further so you can actually visualize little bit more that pathway,” continued Wakeham.
And just down the stairs, biomedical engineering students are diving into what’s called mems, or micro electrical mechanical sensors as ways to detect various diseases or mutations such as cancers.
“That helps to understand what kind of treatment plans are needed for that and how we can approach that treatment using those sensors,” commented PhD Biomedical Engineering Student Mohanish Chandurkar.
“We’re also looking at how is exercisecan be used as medicine and so there’s a large variety of things that are going on in this building that is going to improve the health of people around Michigan and around the world,” continued Heldt.
Michigan tech has been planning this new facility since late 2018, and now that it is open, students will be helping innovation for a long time.
