Paola Sepulveda (Biomedical Engineering)

Paola Sepulveda (Biomedical Engineering) About DOE Fellow Paola Sepulveda was a graduate student in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Florida International University. During the summer of 2010, she interned at the Micro and Nanomechanics Lab at Northwestern University where she performed a preliminary investigation of the cytotoxic effect of nanoinjection of various cell lines using the Nanofountain Probe (NFP). The NFP is an innovative nanoscale fluidic delivery probe designed to pattern and inject nanomaterials at the single cell level. Later that year, she worked in the Nanobioengineering and Bioelectronics Lab at FIU where she assisted two PhD students with their experimental design of the quantitative analysis of the interaction of nano-sized drug carriers with whole cells using atomic force microscopy. In the summer of 2011, Paola worked in the Olfactory Physiology/Computational Neuroscience Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. During this internship, she analyzed if plasticity could be observed in granule cells in the olfactory bulb by developing a classifier to categorize the cells using the statistical method of supervised learning through MATLAB. Paola is now employed at Stryker as a system design engineer.

DOE Related Projects
Paola is currently working closely with Dr. Yelena Katsenovich on the uranium bioremediation of the 200 Area at the Hanford Site in Washington State. The main objective of the investigation is to analyze the bacterial interactions of a less U (VI)-tolerant strain under oxidizing conditions with uranium and to study the potential role of bicarbonate, which is an integral complexing ligand for U (VI) and a major ion in groundwater compositions. Paola presented a professional oral presentation at the 2013 Waste Management Conference titled “Investigation on Microbial Dissolution of Uranium (VI) from Autunite Mineral,” earning her superior scores.

DOE Summer Internship
During the Summer of 2013, Paola interned with the office of Environmental Management at Department of Energy Headquarters in Germantown, Maryland. During this time, Paola assisted Mr. Kurt Gerdes, Director of the Office of Soil and Groundwater, EM-12. EM-12 supports EM’s mission by providing integration, planning, analysis, and guidance for ensuring safe and effective management and remediation of contaminated soil and
groundwater with the goal of reducing risk and the life cycle cost of remediation. Her main role was to complete a database identifying DOE sites using pump and treat systems for groundwater remediation, summarizing the area, contaminants present, costs, and year of operation. This database will eventually be used to update the End-States Analysis.