Will Hoggatt  |  Translational Research

What area of research appeals to you most?

I definitely got hooked on translational research. I was honestly looking forward to senior design, because I knew that application and design were the areas I excelled in. I was anxious for the opportunity to prove that I might not be the best student on paper, but I bring a different set of talents that are just as important. Getting hooked was just a matter of luck in the sense that I happened to really enjoy the project I was assigned to, and the group I was with. I looked at it as an opportunity to apply what I learned, and actually make something that could one day be useful. That was why I wanted to become an engineer in the first place.

Having a group and faculty who were all very interested in the project definitely caused me to get hooked. Almost every day I ended up spending hours and hours coding and working on ideas, but it didn't feel like schoolwork. I couldn't wait to try out a new snippet of code, or try a new design. I credit that to my group and people like Dr. Harbin and Kirk Foster.      

Did you ever have a light bulb moment that influenced your decision to focus on research?

I was always interested, but the closest thing I can remember is the feeling that I got when we were finally able to make the printer move with the code I had written. I had been getting stuck in the first two to three lines of code which connected me to the printer. It took at least a week to get the code working, which was extremely frustrating because those lines were the very first step in getting this thing to work. I wrote code to move the printer while waiting for help to connect, so the first time it moved with my code I was unproportionally happy. That's when I got really excited to take this research as far as I could.  

What happened with your project after senior design? What’s your next step?

The 3D bioprinter project is alive and well. I'm taking what we started in senior design and working on it through Grad School. Hopefully in the near future we will have a working 3D bioprinter here at Purdue. My plan is to eventually start a business with the finished product. Senior design absolutely changed the trajectory of my career. I had been considering going into industry before, and even during the semester of senior design. I interviewed with Anorad about halfway through that semester, and was considering doing work there. Dr. Harbin kept pushing me to consider graduate school though, because she saw how passionate I was about the project. I really can't stress enough how much of an influence she had on my decision; a decision I am 100% sure of now.

Want to know more? Will was featured in a story about our multidisciplinary, team-based, clinical needs-driven approach to translational engineering design in our Spring 2014 newsletter.