 Texas Heart Institute opened the Innovative Device and Engineering Lab, also known as IDEA Lab this year, and hosted several student rotations. These aspiring innovators worked on exciting collaborative projects with other students across the THI labs. We sat down with Dr. Yaxin Wang, who leads the new IDEA Lab to learn more about the goals of the program and to meet her students. Hello, my name is Yaxin Wang. I'm the assistant investigators and directors of IDEA Lab. For our missions, we design and evaluate cardiovascular medical devices. Our expertise is in mechanical circulatory support devices, like elbows. So our lab involves a lot of engineers and scientists, and we also recruit undergrads each year so they can participate in some of our projects and gain some experience. My name is Preston Peek, and I'm a student worker here at the Texas Heart Institute, and I'm a senior biomedical engineering student at Texas A&M University. My name is Tammy Tran, and I currently go to Texas A&M University. I'm a sophomore-biased medical science major. I'm Kira Halbert Elliott. I'm a student worker at the IDEA Lab here at Texas Heart Institute. I'm a senior at Georgia Institute of Technology. Going into engineering for my undergraduate degree made absolute sense. I just love solving puzzles with math and science, and here we get to apply those puzzles to a lot of real-world situations, such as pediatric heart issues. My name is Simon. I'm a research engineer at the IDEA Lab at the Texas Heart Institute. I've been working with one of our interns, and he's been helping me to create the different circuit boards and to assemble the mock circuitry loop. It's essentially a mechanical representation of the human heart, and the goal of it is to be able to use this device to test potential heart devices before they move on to trials. It's always surprising to see someone who's like a leader in their field approach a problem which they don't know, and a lot of times they say, I'm not completely sure, but we'll find the answer. It's a lot of tedious work, but that's the most important part of it, and so you have to be very persistent in that aspect and in collecting that data and constantly just maintain it and doing that same thing over and over again until you're getting the results that you need. I've realized how much goes into it and how much you have to redo, start over, go back to the drawing board and see, okay, why isn't this working? How do we make this component better? While at THI, I've definitely learned different software such as LabView, MyLab Simulink, and I actually use it extensively. I've always been on the more numerical simulation side, and while I've been here, I've gotten to work a lot more with experimental, with getting my hands dirty and trying to actually build the components that I model on the computer, and that those skills are absolutely invaluable and will be very helpful. One thing that's awesome about the IdeaLab is that everyone brings something to the table, and I'm becoming more open to the idea of going to grad school, and I think that my experience with the IdeaLab has pushed me towards that path. I'll be starting a PhD program in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, and I'll be continuing the work that I do here, but this time as a graduate student pursuing a PhD, working in collaboration with the IdeaLab. I've always known that I wanted a career in medicine, so it's definitely kind of iterate to me why I want a career in medicine because of all the research that I'm able to see and be a part of. Working at the IdeaLab has been absolutely amazing, getting to see all of the problems that we work on in engineering class, or on the research side actually be implemented into new and novel devices, and seeing the process where the IdeaLab comes up with the new devices that they want to build in the future, and that's something that I'm absolutely going to take with me because I will be going to med school and hopefully completing a dual MD engineering degree, and I want to keep that engineering side and that focus that the IdeaLab has demonstrated as I go into the medical side, into the clinical aspect of my career, and be able to really combine both and serve people at the nexus of medicine and engineering.