 Hello everyone. My name is Young Kim from Biomedical Engineering. I'm an associate head for research. Our interim head, Nancong is traveling, so I got to privilege to introduce our proud professor, Ruiz Solorio. This is actually my admiration for Professor Solorio. Professor Solorio is a veteran. He started his college after his service. He served the U.S. Army in South Korea. Actually, there are multiple military bases in South Korea, so he served there until 2001. Actually, he finished his service with the rank of Sergeant, so Sergeant Ruiz Solorio. And then he pursues a higher education, so he went to St. Louis University, got a bachelor's degree in chemistry and master's studies, and ran a Lear Polytech RPI in 2007, and then a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in the University of Michigan. And then he went on postdoctoral training in radiology in Case Western. I'm sorry, actually, you got the Ph.D. from Case Western, and then I went to a postdoctoral training for University of Michigan in chemical engineering. So actually, studies from applications of ultrasound imaging and then move on to more engineering of cancer microbiology, microenvironment. Actually, he's the expert in the tissue engineering and drug delivery. Actually, using our engineering principles to apply some cancer and tumor biology and microenvironment. Professor Solorio received numerous awards and recognitions, including NIH, National Institute of Cancer, Independence, Passway to Independence Award, K99. As you know, getting NCI in particular funding is extremely competitive. And also, Schoelter Trust Young Investigator Award, Metavir Early Career Award, Mark Foundation Aspire Award. And actually, he is a really good teacher. During our COVID-19 season, actually, some of the students actually emailed the provost to just thank him for his dedication to our students. So, from an excellent researcher to an excellent teacher. And one thing is that researcher, the key respect I really respect is this. Actually, he's the example of a resilient researcher. And actually, I really want to implement this culture in our unit as well as a good example of the persistence and the pursuit will be paid off. Actually, he's in a really competitive research area, cancer biology, tissue engineering, but he's doing really good. So, I'm happy to introduce him. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Young, for the wonderful introduction. And also, I would like to thank everyone for one, making, sticking around. Because I know after your personal, your person comes, it's probably pretty inviting to just want to head out. And so, thanks for sticking around for the full thing. Also, I want to thank the organizers. You've done a fantastic job. One, making sure that we're prepared for this. And then two, just keeping us on schedule because you have a lot of professors here talking. And that is very much not an easy task to do. And so, what I wanted to talk about today is ultimately we'll get into the research. We'll see if we have time. I might fly through that because a lot of it, it's hard to get into the details of it because it's not so much an engineering approach. It's really truly a biomedical engineering approach. So, to understand the engineering we're doing, you really have to understand the biology as well. And so, it makes it kind of deep and a little difficult to get into in just a couple of minutes. And so, what I wanted to start with was just thinking about why I came to Purdue at the end of the day. And I have a cynical answer and that's that my wife got a job at Cook. And so, I was an easy fossil hire. But really what the real answer is is it was the collaborative environment. And so, I've been at a number of different institutions, a number of different places, and the true nature of our collaborations here are just, I really think, second and none. Like, you can go anywhere else in the world and I just don't feel like you have the same sort of environment that you had here. And that's really what pulled me here at the end of the day. And then, again, if you're thinking about the journey and the trip, none of it is possible without students. And so, I would have not gotten nowhere at all without having an excellent cohort of students. And you can see they've all gone on to do really wonderful things. A lot of them have ended up in Pharma. I have an outstanding student, Sarah Libring, who was the first recipient of the F-99 here at Purdue. And so, it's a transition award from a graduate student at Postdoc. And she's well on her way to us trying to hire her as a faculty here in the near future. Brian June, now at Los Alamos National Lab. So, we just have a number of students that have done really, really well. And then, I've also had a number of really good master students who have also continued in progress projects that I would never have even dreamed of starting without them. And then, beyond that, again, that collaborative environment, just at Purdue alone, I have a whole host of collaborators that I work with. I talk to on a day-to-day basis. Now, beyond those past students, I have a very strong cohort of current students who are really pushing all of our projects forward and they're making huge advancements every single day. Friday lab meetings are the absolute highlight of my week. And so, I look forward to getting the opportunity to hear what they've been up to all the time and see how much they've advanced things over the course of the week to month that they've been working on these different projects. And beyond that, I've had a host of wonderful mentors throughout my career starting with Jan Stegman, who was my master's research advisor who put up with a lot of my naivete with basic experimental design and helped rein me in when I was way too ambitious for things. And then, Agata Exner, my PhD advisor, fantastic human being, really set the course of my career trajectory, as well as Jurg Lahan and Gary Luker who were my postdoc research advisors. And once I left that training environment, it was, I had the misfortune, I mean, the fortune of being next to Dave Humulus. So, his office was right next to mine. And it turns out that the walls are very thin in MJAS. And so, I knew exactly when Dave was in his office or not because I heard every word of his conversation. And so, because of that, we became quick friends because I knew exactly when his meetings ended and we would go to lunch. And so, I just walked across. And so, Dave has always been really wonderful. It's just given me general life advice with career. So, well, not my official faculty mentor. He was just a true and wonderful mentor throughout my career. Kenom Park, who, again, an absolute fantastic human being, I had the privilege of teaching my very first class with Kenom. And Kenom is just a truly, I mean, world-class researcher bar none. But beyond that, I think a lot of people don't understand just how excellent of a teacher he is. And so, having the opportunity to sit into a classroom and watching an absolute master of work was really instrumental in me learning how to teach. Because up to that point, you know, I'd taught the occasional lecture but I never ran a course, but seeing Kenom do it, I really learned the ins and outs. And then last, even though Mike, at the time he'd been hired here just a few years before I was, he kind of helped me navigate some of the early stages of tenure process and, again, a very close friend and collaborator. And so, with that, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about myself and about that journey. So, like a lot of us here, my path couldn't have not has been more nonlinear. So, I started off, I was born in Anaheim, California. And my dad is from Michoacan, Mexico. My mom is from Orange County. And so, they lived in Anaheim. And so, when I was a kid, we used to spend a lot of time in Disneyland and then they decided to up and move to the middle of nowhere in Missouri. So, I went from going on rides on the Madden Horde Bobsled to riding ATVs in the woods. And so, different kinds of rides, different kinds of adventures, but there was absolutely nothing there except for woods and woods. And so, I actually started to learn that I really liked being outdoors, really liked that environment, did a lot of camping. And I wish I could say I was a model student. I wish I could say I was a valedictorian. I wish I could say that I was 100% focused on my classes. I wish I could say that I was really focused and just great at time management. But I would be lying to you. I was none of those things. I was a terrible student because I couldn't focus on things. And I had terrible time management. I think I had a C average graduating high school. And my family wasn't super well off, so I didn't really have a lot of options. And one day, kind of in line with this, a recruiter came up to me and he was like, hey, do you want to skip a day of school? And I was like, yes. Yes, please. What do I got to do? Sign me up. And so, he said, well, all you got to do is take a test and then that'll take a couple hours in the morning and then you have the rest of the day off. And I was like, let's do this. Well, I didn't realize he was going to be at my house at 6 in the morning. So I already kind of felt like I got the short end of the stick when he showed up. We drove down. I did the ASVAB test. It was kind of a test to measure your overall attributes towards military careers. And then when he got done, he was like, oh, you're smart. And I was like, am I? And he was like, yeah. He was like, you can do whatever you want to in the military. And so I was like, that sounds kind of interesting. And I thought about it and I happened to hang out with my friend. He's a friend from high school named Wally. And we walked into his house and we'd been doing something that we weren't supposed to be doing, I'm sure. And his grandpa was like, hey, what were you doing? And then Wally was like, oh, we were just playing hockey. And he was like, no, you weren't. And then he started pointing out like little like intricate details about all the problems with our story. And I was like, and then when we left, Wally was like, I hate that. I was like, my grandpa was a veteran and he was a counterintelligence operative. He knows everything that I do all the time. And I was like, well, that sounds interesting. And since I had the offer on the table, I joined the Army not long afterwards. And so while I was in the military, I ended up becoming a voice intercept operator. And so what that means is I went to, I got the fortune to go to Monterey, California for a year as part of the Defense Language Institute. And up to that point, it had no ability to focus on anything. And now my job was to learn Korean. And so it was the first time I ever knuckled down and studied in my life. And so I got good enough at Korean language to make it through the program. And then I started the next levels of training where I got to go to Korea eventually. I spent a year in Korea. And then I ended up at Fort Campbell. It's part of the 101st Airborne Division. I went to Air Assault School, the primary leadership development course, and also became a combat lifesaver. So that was quite a different set of experiences. And when I got out of the military, I was very happy with it, almost re-enlisted. But then I really wanted the opportunity to actually go to college. And so the whole time growing up, my dad, I think his highest level of education, I want to say, was the eighth grade. And then my mom was just from, at the time, just a high school graduate and eventually went on to get her bachelor's in the evenings and stuff. So she was very adamant that I go to college. And so the military provided the GI benefit, which at the time seemed great. It was $30,000, which I thought was a lot of money. Turns out it's not. At the time, I thought it was a whole lot of money. And so I started off. I got out of the military and I went to community college. And I started with the plan of just doing the fastest degree that I could. So I was planning on taking a route through business so that I could do contract work for the government because you needed a bachelor's degree to do the sort of contract work that I needed. And I had all the connections that I needed, all the training, and the pay was excellent. And so the only problem was I hated business classes and I was so bored. But then when I would take my STEM classes, I would perk up. And so I realized that I kind of liked math. I really liked chemistry. And so I was planning on doing an emphasis in chemistry for an associate's degree and then transferred to a bachelor's school. But the class that I needed next, they weren't offering it because no one else wanted to take it. So it was going to be another year before I could take it. I didn't have the patience for it, so I just quit community college. And then I started up at St. Louis University. And so while I was at St. Louis University, I got really fortunate and that Cecil Thomas, who had been at Case Western Reserve University, was one of their founding members. At the time it was ranked in the top five engineering programs in the country, started the new BME program at St. Louis University mirroring Case's program. And he hired excellent faculty. A lot of them have gone on to become heads and chairs of programs all across the country. So at the time it was this real locus of high quality teachers. And the program itself was just a bachelor's level program. So these were absolute experts in the field who were just 100% focused on our education. And so I learned a lot and I got the opportunity to research with a number of different people. And it wasn't like research that I often see in these bigger research institutes. I was treated as a grad student. And so when I came in and started the project, I was expected to do the research. I was expected... My expectations were very, very high. And it was all volunteer work so I didn't get paid for it. And so we won a couple of awards with some of the projects that I got there. And I realized that I really liked doing research. And so I... At the time I met my... Now she's now my wife, but we started dating my wife when I was at St. Louis University and we hit a crossroads. She had found her dream position in case Western Reserve University whereas I found my ideal research position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. So I naively thought, why does well just roll with this and we're going to not let our feelings for each other affect our career choices. That was a terrible decision. And I was miserable and I was driving back and forth between Troy, New York and Cleveland, Ohio through the dead of winter every year. And so what I ultimately ended up doing was leaving Rensselaer and going to Case where I got to work with Goda Egsner who was a wonderful, wonderful research advisor and what she really did was she really pushed me. And so by the time I graduated at Case I had 12 manuscripts or 12 different publications and she thought I would be a very competitive applicant for the Department of Defense breast cancer research fellowship. And at the time I didn't... I didn't have a lot of confidence in myself but I went ahead and applied and so I ended up being one of three recipients for that award and it allowed me to... And then while I was doing this I kind of reached back out to Jan Steckman who is my master's advisor and I asked him, so with Postdoc Awards what's the role here? What can we do? And he said, what you want to do is think about your brand and what are the skills and techniques that you're missing from your PhD that you should grow if you're going to do this primary research advisor role. And that's where I ended up going to University of Michigan where I got the opportunity to work in a very big lab where Goda's lab is very small so I kind of got to learn how to manage and do these sort of things. And the benefit of this whole program was that I got to look at this five years... I got to look at breast cancer as a focus and a part of it was writing up like what my overall career plan was and so what I got to do was think about this in terms of how can I make a difference and how can I help? And so what I started to do was think about things in terms of metastasis at the time. There was no one looking at metastatic research and the tools that they had available were non-existent and so I thought I can make a difference here and so what we started to do was really kind of dive into the different hallmarks of metastasis over the course of our research apply our chemistry background with our understanding of general physics and what it did is it allowed us to create a few different high impact papers really kind of understanding the ability of tumors to modulate the different micro environment and so we started to develop tools again working with Mike Wint we kind of identified some different proteins and pathways and developed some novel approaches for creating very higher order structures much more similar to tissues than what you would see normally and what this allowed us to do was to start some really cool projects with collaborators here at Purdue where we could write these memetic tissues to really study this disease and so through this we've identified a number of different pathways that allow us to understand kind of those true underpinnings in biology that are going on during metastasis and really understand what is happening when tissues take on these invading cells and in that understand what it is that's changing within these tissues that allow these cells to grow and expand and so with that we kind of flew through the science but what I obviously need to acknowledge is our funding sources and so as Youngin mentioned we've been fortunate to be pretty well funded throughout my career things started with the Department of Defense while I was here the first grant I got was the Mark Foundation that allowed us to do some precision medicine testing we got to the Catherine Peachey Foundation to start to look at effects of motion and actual the role that the tissue movement has we have metavibers that allowed us to continue that work as well as funds from NCATS, NCI, NIBIB and the NSF so with that I think I will open it up for questions Okay, close to the end so let's start with some interesting questions All right You have certainly excellent mentors here at Purdue and maybe David Umlis is fortunate A little questionable on that one but Kenan Kim is a really good mentor Did he ever mentor you over some Korean spirits or whiskey? There has been a number of meetings that involve soju for sure He has made me earn my rank as a boiler maker Actually we don't have true boiler makers in our... You are the true boiler maker? Well Kenan definitely is Congratulations Can you speak a little bit to how you started out with more foundational funding and what led you to search for that and how did that help you build the blocks to go for the bigger grants? Thank you Yeah, absolutely So I actually got pretty lucky when I first... which I feel like is the hallmark of my entire career but I went to a conference, a Gordon research conference and I happened to meet a person who... we were showing that some of our environments were very, very good at allowing primary metastatic patient cells to grow and expand for drug testing and there was a partner that... a colleague that I ended up meeting named Wilbert Zwart and Netherland who happened to be in close contact with this foundation the Mark Foundation and he was like hey we have these tools that we have in place to study drug sensitivity of metastatic cancer cells and because we're part of the only... the Netherland Cancer Institute it's the only cancer foundation in the Netherlands we have access to near infinite number of patient samples can we use your devices and test the samples to figure out what's going on and so we set up a partnership MTA and then I started sending samples to him and then I ended up having the opportunity send some students over there to teach them how to do things we were planning on having them send students to us COVID happened so that kind of nicks that but that really started a lot of the work we were able to actually get close so now we're hopeful to go into a phase 1 clinical trial with those devices in the Netherlands so that's what we're moving towards now Okay I have a question actually I'm a NCI trained the cancer researcher and I decided to leave the field because it's so competitive cancer is really complex as people study more I think the answer they get is oh cancer is more complex than we thought so how would you kind of navigate this competitive and also complex the research communities in the field so one is make friends so that helps because you can't know it all and so you have to create colleagues that are experts in the areas that you're not and so in recognizing what you know and what you don't know I think is very key for that the other kind of big part of that is to it's going to sound kind of intuitive is to dumb it down so what I found is when you start to show the very most cutting edge of research that you're doing and your newest findings people don't know how to take it and stuff that I was proposing when I first got hired people said I was crazy for and then now that it's been several years people are now saying that it's commonplace knowledge and all the stuff that we were saying forever ago it was happening and so what I found is that you have to wherever you're at when you're at the very cutting edge take it back a couple levels so that you're assume that they have not read the most up-to-date nature paper assume that they're at cancer research level with their reading and kind of go with where the bulk of people are interested but then try and be just a little because you know what's coming just take that guide them into your thought process but don't hit them over the head with it because if not they don't believe you and then a few years later they're like everyone knows this even though no one did at the time back to your gathering status thank you very much for your service to the country I'm happy to you that was a wonderful experience okay thank you everyone for coming to this celebration let's congrats all the new associate professors again