Marina Echave is studying the Degree of Biomedical Engineering at Tecnun and in September she starts her last year. But before that, this summer, she has been one of the students chosen to do an internship at the CIC Nanogune in San Sebastian, together with other students from different universities.

What are these internships contributing to your training?

The truth is that it is being a very enriching experience both staff and professionally. I am working hand in hand with a PhD student, which is allowing me to learn about the world of research. I am gaining knowledge about techniques that I had not fully explored at university until now.

All of us who are doing our summer internships are in the same office. Degrees Most of them are physicists, however, there are also students who have taken different courses such as biology, Biochemistry or biotechnology. This has allowed us to learn things from different disciplines. The atmosphere we have created is unbeatable, we are like a pineapple.

Was it clear to you from an early age that science was for you?

The truth is that I have always liked biology, Chemistry, as well as mathematics and physics. I think that Biomedical Engineering is a career that encompasses all this knowledge and allows me to apply it to human medicine to improve the quality of life of people. I decided to study at Tecnun because I knew that the level of Education I would receive would be very good. In addition, my brother also studied at the School and my parents were satisfied with the training he acquired.

How did the opportunity to go to Nanogune arise?

My brother, at the time, applied to get the scholarship for the summerinternship at Nanogune. He was unlucky, as they chose a Biomedical Engineering student. That's when I found out that this research center offered the opportunity for a summer internship and decided to give it a try when I had the chance.

What is the work you are doing?

As I have previously mentioned, I am assisting a Ph. The thesis is about the development of a new pH/lactate sensor. During delivery, babies can suffer periods of hypoxia, i.e. the amount of oxygen in the blood decreases. This is known as hypoxia-ischemic encephalopathy and the consequences can be very serious for the baby. Current methods are not continuous, are slow and very inaccurate, giving many false positives. Because of this, many caesarean sections are performed without being necessary.

My work consists of first preparing the lactate and pH samples both here and at CICbiomaGUNE, since they are indicators of hypoxia. Once all the samples of different concentrations/values are done, we have to obtain the spectra using the Raman spectrometer, in our case, we are using one with a wavelength of 785nm. With such data, it is impossible to see differences in the spectra with respect to the small variations of the samples. Therefore, it is important to use a program (in our case MATLAB) to process the data using different methods. Among them, smoothing, Savitzky-Golay, multivariate analysis, PLS (Partial Least Squares)... 

Would you recommend doing the internship there?

I would encourage everyone to try this experience. In my case, I am in the Nanoengineering group. This group is very suitable for those who are studying Degree in Biomedical Engineering, because you learn a little bit of everything. Working with lasers, working in the lab, data analysis... and all focused on the biomedical field. One of the "curious" things about my group is that Andreas Seifert (the group leader) is giving us optics classes to broaden our knowledge. The truth is that we are learning a lot and we appreciate the motivation of sample to transmit us his knowledge.