Claudia Gutierrez

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Drexel faculty mentors: Fred Allen, Alisa Morss Clyne, Karen Nulton, Banu Onaral, Adrian Shieh, Kara Spiller

Claudia graduated from Drexel in 2015 with a combined BS/MS in Biomedical Engineering and is now pursuing an MD at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine. Claudia’s first research experience at Drexel was as a STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) Scholar in Drexel’s Vascular Kinetics Laboratory (PI: Dr. Alisa Morss Clyne). It was during her first co-op at the medical device company Rex Medical that Claudia first experienced the importance of international and cross-cultural communication in research. As part of her co-op, she had the opportunity to travel to Argentina and Chile to help translate between engineers and physicians in Argentina and Chile on the collaborative development of a novel device. She then spent her next co-op abroad as a Whitaker Undergraduate Fellow conducting research in the Laboratory of Lymphatic and Cancer Bioengineering under Dr. Melody Swartz at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL).

Since starting medical school she has developed aspirations to become a reconstructive surgeon and has become fascinated by the potential applications of regenerative medicine in this field. She hopes to return to Switzerland to work with experts in tissue engineering under Dr. Ivan Martin at the University Hospital of Basel to develop a novel stem-cell based bone tissue engineering scaffold using epigenetic regulators in partnership with Dr. van Wiejnen from Mayo Clinic’s Center for Regenerative Medicine.

Related content:
DFO Interviews Claudia Gutierrez, Drexel Student and Whitaker Undergraduate Scholar - May 2014
A Full Roster of Fulbrights (Drexel Magazine) - Fall 2017
Record Number of Fulbright Grantees (2017 Drexel President's Report) - January 2018