IMU Medical Biotechnology Student Interns at a Singapore University

An IMU Medical Biotechnology student, Ng Aivon, was given the opportunity to undergo her 3-month internship in the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory under the division of Department of Bioengineering in National University of Singapore (NUS). Aivon choose to to do her internship at this laboratory as it provides both design-based and research-based projects for students. On top of that, the laboratory is well-known in producing quality projects. “During my internship, I am honoured to be able to work under the supervision of Prof Leo Hwa Liang, and his lab focuses on the computational and experimental biofluid mechanics on the heart valve engineering as well as artificial liver device. During my internship, I was mainly dealing with coronary heart stent on its principles of biomechanics as well as the design and development. Basically, I was learning two different software, which are Solidworks and Abaqus to carry out the finite element analysis (FEA) on different design of coronary heart stent. In order to carry out the analysis, first Solidwork was used to construct and create the model of coronary heart stent from a 2D sketch to a fully-defined 3D model. After that, the 3D-model was imported to Abaqus, to carry out the analysis with different meshes and parameters such as boundary conditions, loads, and different support points”. Moving from a medical biotechnology setting to a biomedical engineering setting, Aivon’s biggest challenge was on mastering the computational skills, in which she has to familiarize with the software within a short period of time as well as deepen her knowledge on the background of the stent in terms of flexibility, its materials, the boundary conditions and many more. Nevertheless, the soft skills that she acquired at IMU, particularly the problem solving and time management skills had been a great help.

“I am thankful to IMU MB programme for equipping me well with sufficient syllabus and skills on bioinformatics and tissue engineering. This further stimulated my interest to venture into the bioengineering industry”.