Outstanding Senior Spotlight: Saahil Sachdeva

For a student at the University of California, Davis, a campus renowned for its predilection toward bicycles, it's no surprise that biomedical engineering senior Saahil Sachdeva first came to engineering out of a desire to work on his bicycle.

"I pursued engineering to install the pedals that would propel my bike," he said.  

Cycling through his interests in biology, math and engineering, Sachdeva arrived at biomedical engineering, finding it the best combination of all three. This also allowed him to pivot to something grander than fixing his bike.

"UC Davis taught me that engineering is more about building a means to achieve your goal."

For Sachdeva, that goal is connecting cutting-edge biomedical technology to clinicians and their patients. Throughout his undergraduate program, he says he learned the vital lesson that making these connections can be a complicated yet important endeavor.  

This became clear to him through his participation in Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis Health, a bench-to-bedside experience part of the Quarter at Aggie Square program. It brings junior-level students into operating rooms to observe and identify unmet clinical needs.

Sachdeva worked with Dr. Kyle Walker, an orthopaedic surgeon at UC Davis Health, to improve patient recovery times after surgery.

"The invasiveness of orthopedic surgery causes long postoperative protocols, including extended inpatient stay, lifelong medication and rehabilitation," Sachdeva said. "After multiple discussions throughout the quarter with surgeons, physical therapists and patients, my team and I converted these observations into a senior design project."

Sachdeva and his team's capstone, ImmobiCUFF, is an implantable device to improve shoulder rehabilitation following a rotator cuff repair surgery. It was the first time students in the Quarter at Aggie Square program worked with a surgeon to engineer a solution to a problem they had observed in the operating room as a senior design project — previous teams had chosen a medical need to solve from a curated list.

Due to the success of his team's efforts, Sachdeva has written and had a paper accepted that formalizes a framework to help students translate surgical observations into an original biomedical engineering idea during the clinical immersion program.

"The students will now have a dedicated research project with a UC Davis Medical Center faculty member and  a direct pathway to translate their identified unmet clinical need from the operating room into a senior design project to engineer their solution."

Sachdeva is grateful for the mentorship he received from Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Chancellor's Fellow Aijun Wang and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Jinhwan Kim, both of whom lead the biomedical engineering experience through Quarter at Aggie Square. He said the effect of their mentorship on him changed the course of his life.

After graduation, Sachdeva will pursue a master's degree in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He aims to specialize in imaging and medical devices to gain the skills necessary to launch a medical device company in the future.  

To take it all back to his interest in working on his bike, Sachdeva is driven by and exemplifies outstanding engineering with a direct and positive impact.