Dialog reporter
WILMINGTON – It is common for students to gain professional experience in their chosen field. Internships are the norm in many industries. Usually, however, it is college students who fill these positions.
For Kalani Picho, this opportunity arrived earlier than usual. This past summer, between her sophomore and junior years at Padua Academy, the 16-year-old spent eight weeks at the University of Delaware taking part in high-level mechanical engineering research.
She and other students assisted Dr. Lucas Lu with data analysis and hands-on experiments with a new drug.
“It was the bioengineering lab,” Picho said. “We were mostly working with cartilage. We were testing different drugs to see if they helped to regenerate the cartilage after we induced damage to simulate osteoarthritis.”
Some cartilage samples, which came from a calf knee joint, were exposed to a drug that is known to work, while other samples were treated with a new drug. The researchers took videos of the cells after five and 10 days of drug exposure, evaluating whether the cartilage had improved.
Padua junior Kalani Picho spent this past summer interning with a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Delaware and hopes to pursue a similar career path. (The Dialog/Mike Lang)
The work with which Picho assisted was the basis for two published abstracts that are the basis for future research papers. She is mentioned as a co-author in both, and she was invited to attend the 2016 Orthopedic Research Society’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., in March. That is not the only reason Picho is excited to attend.
“They’ll also have different workshops you can go to. It will be cool to learn new things about not just the research I did, but other research people did in the field,” she said.
Padua math teacher Cheri Szurkowski alerted Picho to the summer program at Delaware. They first met when Picho was a freshman in honors geometry and on the robotics team.
“Sometimes being an underclassman amongst older students can be intimidating,” Szurkowski said. “However, with Kalani, she held her own and excelled.”
Picho is currently the lead engineer for the robotics team, a quality Szurkowski believed fit the University of Delaware program.
“Due to her leadership abilities and perseverance, I thought recommending her to the program was a perfect match for Kalani and UD,” the teacher said.
Picho, who graduated from St. Mary Magdalen, said she would like to be a mechanical engineer in the future. She particularly enjoys robotics and aeronautics.
“I was looking maybe to design airplanes, or a new kind of airplane. Something different. This research kind of got me looking into biomechanics also. Any way that I can apply engineering to help people and invent new things,” she said.
She has always had an interest in science. She likes doing experiments because she can see things happening.
“That’s my favorite part of science,” she said. “You get to see a reaction, something going on. You can write down your observations and come to a conclusion based on what you saw. Discovering new things, trying to use the knowledge to invent new things. I really like inventing. That’s why I like engineering. I just enjoy that kind of stuff.”
She said she has found a supportive atmosphere for her education at Padua, where she is a member of the National Honor Society and serves as a student ambassador. She takes advanced placement calculus and chemistry, along with an engineering and computer-aided design class.
“Padua is a good place to learn,” Picho said. “Whatever dream people are working toward, Padua will definitely help them to reach those goals.”
