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Engineering Impact: How Undergraduate Research Sparked a Career in Medical Innovation
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Megan Christy, who earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering in 2023, shares how undergraduate research led to working on cutting-edge surgical devices. Her three years with a Duke Bass Connections team led her from eye-tracking studies with young football players to Sinai Biodesign and now to a promising new startup.
You’re in the stands at a Friday night football game. A quarterback charges toward the endzone only to be tackled hard by a linebacker. As you spring to your feet, the young athlete’s body twists and his helmet hits the turf. When he gets up, the crowd cheers.
You’re left wondering: ‘What just happened to his brain?’
For the past ten years, a Bass Connections research project at Duke has been working to answer that question. Focused on one of the most urgent challenges in pediatric sports medicine — the underlying injury mechanisms, diagnosis and long-term effects of concussions and subconcussive head injuries — the team brings together students and faculty from biomedical engineering, computer science, psychiatry, neuroscience and head and neck surgery.
Brain injury is one of the leading causes of disability and death in children, and sports-related concussions account for 30 – 60% of all pediatric concussion cases. Clinicians still lack reliable tools to diagnose these injuries and monitor recovery — especially the potential cumulative effects of repeated, lower-level impacts that don’t cause immediate symptoms.
Eye Tracking to Measure Brain Injury
To address this gap, the faculty and students have partnered with youth football programs in Durham and Raleigh to develop a novel approach: using eye-tracking technology to assess neurological function.
Each year, interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students design and refine oculomotor assessments — tasks that measure how well the eyes track visual stimuli — and pair them with head impact data collected through a team-developed earpiece sensor (called DASHR) worn by athletes during practices and games.
The project has made a meaningful impact on the many students who have contributed to it.
The result is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal datasets of its kind — tracking athletes ages 5 to 18 over multiple seasons to deepen our understanding of concussion mechanisms and inform better diagnostics, recovery protocols and athletic policies. Just as importantly, the project has made a meaningful impact on the many students who have contributed to it, helping to shape their academic journeys and set them up for purpose-driven careers.
Megan Christy: Student Researcher to Medical Innovator
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Megan Christy joined the project in 2020 as as sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering.
“I had played competitive soccer in high school and had a strong interest in neuroscience,” Christy recalls. “This project felt like a great combination of my interests, and a great fit for a research experience throughout college.”
Due to the pandemic, she couldn’t interact directly with athletes during her first year to collect data. Instead, she focused on developing a computer algorithm that used a brain signal called corollary discharge, which could be identified by adding another step to the eye tracking protocols, to detect subtle signs of low-level head impacts.
“I worked on identifying whether a corollary discharge was happening during specific eye-tracking tasks and then tried to quantify that signal to create a threshold that could help assess levels of subconcussion,” she explains. “Dr. Luck was an excellent mentor.”
It really reinforced my intentions of being a professional engineer.
Despite having limited experience with coding and no background in eye-tracking, Christy embraced the challenge.
“It was a pretty independent project in an area I wasn’t familiar with. I was really proud to turn it from a concept into something tangible — and to leave it in a place where someone else could build on it.”
Her work culminated in a Graduation with Distinction in biomedical engineering. “It really reinforced my intentions of being a professional engineer and staying in this field and my interest in the neuroscience space specifically.”
Mount Sinai — and a New Startup
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After graduating, Christy joined Sinai Biodesign, a medical device incubator within the neurosurgery department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City — where she’s always wanted to live.
“I did mechanical and electrical engineering for early-stage devices across a lot of departments including OB-GYN, ENT, neurosurgery, spine and dermatology,” she says.
As a product development engineer, Christy worked closely with surgeons, helping them translate clinical needs into functional prototypes, validating designs through testing and preparing them for potential licensing or commercialization.
“I got to observe a lot of surgeries relevant to the devices and shadow physicians in the clinic. That is certainly the most valuable part of my job. One of the great things about Sinai Biodesign is the proximity to the surgeons and to the hospital and the clinics. It gave me a deeper understanding of the patient experience and the real-world impact of the devices we were developing.”
Now, Christy is taking the next step in her career: joining a startup that spun out of one of those projects. She is lead engineer for Pharyvac Surgical Technologies, developing a novel, single-use device to revolutionize aspiration — the removal of blood or particles from a patient’s airways — in ENT and skull base surgeries, particularly endoscopic sinus surgery. This is the first device to eliminate the need for both throat packs and a separate suction tool and aims to save surgeons’ time, increase safety and improve patient outcomes.
“That's been my journey so far. Even though I’m not working in neuroscience right now, I definitely still feel connected to the space that first inspired me.”
Main image: Megan Christy presents her Bass Connections research for Graduation with Distinction. (Photo: Courtesy of Megan Christy)
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June 5, 2025- Loading...May 30, 2025Deadline: June 9, 2025. More than 20 project teams are recruiting additional student team members to begin work in Fall 2025. All current undergraduate students and incoming and current graduate students are invited to apply.