Having come off the heels of the 2025-2026 MD application cycle and deciding (semi-intentionally) that, at the moment, a career in medicine may not be for me, I have decided to expand and demonstrate some of my capabilities as an engineer through a personal project aligned with my interests.

Almost one year ago I began this blog and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it, so now I’m going to use my website to document the research, experiments, and results of my first project outside of school for my portfolio.

Given my interests in electrical engineering and optics, the availability of materials in my apartment, I’d like to start a project involving the implementation of FPGA for an imaging project.

Imaging projects that I have previously completed in class include the light path of a two-channel epifluorescence microscope (my partners’ write-up is on my linkedin) and using widefield spatial-frequency domain imaging (SFDI) to characterize apple slices’ absorption and scattering properties (based off this 2016 paper by Hu et al.,), for which I have to dig up all the artifacts from my computer.

For now, here’s a list of concepts and techniques that seem interesting (and often hardly feasible)

  • Brillouin microscopy
  • Hyperspectral imaging
  • White light interferometry
  • Fourier ptychography
  • Adaptive optics (maybe w/ microfluidics)
  • Photoacoustic imaging

Each really have a plethora of FPGA uses for data processing and obvious optical involvement. I will try and update this blog as I do more research on each topic, I’ll probably do a one-ish page write up on each to summarize key concepts, implementation, applications, and research landscape involving each.