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Marshall Scholar Ambika Bumb knows firsthand about the importance of technology in medicine. As an intern at GE Healthcare last summer, she helped her team diagnose and repair a problem that caused new blood pressure monitors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to take more than 10 minutes to get a reading—time that could mean the difference between life and death.
"This may sound idealistic," said Bumb, "but I want to help come up with a new technology or treatment for a disease. I want to be the person who follows it through to make sure it reaches the people I'm developing it for," she said.
A senior in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, Bumb plans to get her degree this spring, just three years after she enrolled on a Reginald S. Fleet President's Scholarship. She's using her Marshall to pursue a Ph.D. in medical engineering at Oxford this fall.
Bumb is the sixth Georgia Tech student to win the Marshall, a scholarship established by the British Government for American students in 1953. Today the scholarships stands as one of the world's most prestigious.
She worked with associate professor Gang Bao on developing nanomolecular beacon tracking devices to map the territory of cells. This year, she's extending this research by designing a new tracking tool, a quantum dot, for vitamin D in the lab of professor Barbara Boyan. The quantum dot could be used to help treat bone and cartilage diseases such as osteoporosis and rickets.
Bumb also served on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board, working with prominent business leaders to advise the administration on future goals. A member of the student government's the Joint Finance Committee, she helped decide how to allocate $3.5 million collected from the student activities fee.
In addition, she helped found a new Indian dance team at Tech, Nazaaqat, which played to a packed house at the Ferst Center for the Arts.
"Like most kids, when I was little I had dreams of saving the world—inventing a cure or finding the key to world peace," she said. "Now I have returned to that childhood fantasy, actually seeing that there may be a chance of me being able to make an impact on the world in some way." | 