 As a Purdue student, you have all the opportunities you need to do things that change the world around you. It's just your job to take that opportunity. We wanted a second child because I just really enjoyed being a mom, so I wanted to do it again. It was great joy that we were expecting. Then it turned into shock. Everything was fine until we went for a routine ultrasound. The technician came in with the doctor to tell us that there was an umfaliceal, which I... What is that? I was born with a somewhat rare condition that's called an umfaliceal, so that's when your digestive tract doesn't all come back into your body. It develops outside of your body, and so I was born with my liver outside of my body. And what that meant for me was I had to have a almost immediate corrective surgery to put that liver back inside of my body. When the doctor approached us with the process of actually getting that muscle together, they gave us the two options. It was Mesh, and then he said, the newest is the SIS procedure, the pig intestine. He was brand new. I had never heard of such a thing, so it was like, what? I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man, so it was intriguing to me even from an early age to say, how can you combine the technology with medicine, with people? So I was interested in engineering, but I was also interested in medicine, and so I chose Purdue. I met Dr. Geddes. Dr. Geddes is one of my mentors, one of the founders of the Biomedical Engineering Center at Purdue, and there's a faculty conversation about vascular grafts. That's always important. So Dr. Geddes said, you know, when we think about using pig intestines, there's this thin membrane that's pretty strong, and then implanted that. And after time, when they looked at the X-Plant, this thin material that's probably 200 microns thick actually remodeled into vascular graft like tissue. And that was the discovery of the SIS material that has healing properties and regenerative properties there. What do we need to do to take the technology that was at Purdue and make it medical grade SIS? Cook got involved in the late 1990s and started Cook Biotech in 1995 in the Purdue Research Park and tried to get it in every clinical application that we can. So we talk about Logan. That was the type of material he had and was this product that we had cleared for soft tissue repair. At that point, I would have probably been one of the first infants to really receive this kind of treatment. Essentially, SIS, when it's put in the body, the physical scaffolding in your body really builds itself back in, and then once it's done creating that new tissue, it just simply dissolves away. So there's no need for follow-up surgeries. He was predicted six weeks for ICU and he was in and out in nine days. It never slowed him down a bit. Not a bit. Growing up, I didn't have a great understanding until, you know, closer to the time I was in kindergarten about what really happened. When I was about four years old, my dad had told me it was the zipper that they used to put my new batteries in because I was a robot. Which is a funny joke, but when you're four years old, you believe your dad and you think you're a robot. We knew from birth, practically, he was going to be an engineer. We would buy him a specific kit, but he would completely tear it apart and then just create whatever was in his head. It was amazing what he could construct and where his brain went. You look back thinking, well, he's putting all this stuff together and he's obsessed with Thomas the Tank engine. Well, engineer and what is Purdue? Trains. I think at all, all that was set forth when he was three or four. You'll see the slogan, blaze your own trail. We have a lot more flexibility here in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary engineering both. You can take whatever your individual skills are. So for me, like visual communication and systems thinking and problem solving and I can take all of those and take classes that really hit on each of those individual skills and create a degree that's really tailored to my own skill set. Earlier this year, I'd been invited to an award celebration, a banquet with the multidisciplinary engineering school here at Purdue and that was really the first time I got to meet Amesh. When I met Logan was a small group of the other student awardees. We met in their departmental office. I had a piece of the material and showed that and you said just, oh yeah, I had pig intestine implanted in me. I didn't think anything of it at that time because I wasn't sure if it was really the technology or not. He was handing around these pieces and telling me these are from a pig. I said, that sounds familiar. You know, that rang a bell with me. So almost immediately after that I had called my parents and said, hey, does this sound familiar to you? And they said, yeah, I think that's exactly what you had. Right there on my record from Riley Hospital, SIS, some mucosa, graft courtesy of Cook Biotech. It was surreal. It was like a full circle. In the evening we had the award ceremony and went there and then his mother came up to me and just was saying, hey, he had your material implanted in him. So yeah, that was pretty neat. Who would have ever thought that we would meet the doctor that created this significant surgery from my son's life? It's almost like there was a bond between him and Logan. I didn't have any idea who Umesh was until I met him that day and started asking him what do you do at Cook and he started describing what they do and what he'd created and it was really surreal that he came from the same program that I'm going to graduate from here and that we had all these connections in just an awesome moment. That night was a proud night for me to reflect on what happened in my career and where I am and with my family, my parents were there and it was nice that they got to see that. Surgeons and doctors get to see the people who benefit from these technologies but the people who create them like Umesh, they don't have that first-hand experience with the patients so, you know, him being able to meet me just was really important to be able to connect with me and be able to hear my experience. I think it is important that in any company they understand the mission of the company and ours is serving patients. He's really oriented his career towards helping people. I think that's one of the most noble things he can do as an engineer is help others. The Purdue intersection is just amazing. This technology was invented a thousand feet from this location and then for it to help a patient that was a baby that became a Purdue student. It's crazy all the connections that are there. Being a Purdue graduate really set the foundation of my career and things I've learned here, the professors that taught me, that mentored me really set the foundation for me in terms of my career, where I went, where I'm going. Yeah, that night was powerful. Just us having that connection, making that connection, realizing that connection really that we'd had all along. Being able to look back on everything that I've been through up to this point in retrospect and seeing the way that being a Purdue engineer has shaped the person I am has been a very valuable experience and I can't wait to bring the experience I've had into the workplace. That night when I met Umesh and really got to understand the connection we had it gives you a sense of belonging almost to see the connections you have with the world and the people around you. It shouldn't be any surprise really that the technology that was a game changer for me came straight out of the university that I would end up going to later in life. So if you're trying to change the world Purdue is the place to do it because we do it every day.