Natalie Kuldell (00:02):
Hi, Marsha, thank you for joining this conversation.
Marsha Rolle (00:06):
Hello, Natalie. Thank you for inviting me. I’m really excited about this.
Natalie Kuldell (00:11):
I’m really glad you’re here. You have a really fascinating role at WPI. And so maybe you can just introduce yourself and say a little bit about where you work and what you do.
Marsha Rolle (00:22):
Absolutely. So I’m a professor at WPI in the biomedical engineering department, and I have played many roles in that job. I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. So I teach introduction to biomaterials for our sophomore students and biomedical engineering. I also teach some graduate courses that are focused, mostly tissue engineering, cell engineering, and teaching engineers, how to understand cell biology. So y’all are probably learning that it’s a lot like learning a new language. Anytime you’re, you know, trying to understand these different scientific disciplines. You’re learning a vocabulary as well as sort of the technical specifics and the skills that you need to work in this field. So, um, biomedical engineering draws on many different engineering disciplines, as well as biology and life sciences, with our ultimate goal as biomedical engineers is to create the tools that clinicians can use, that doctors will use, in order to help, you know, treat disease and help keep patients healthy.
Marsha Rolle (01:31):
Um, so that’s something that interested me from early on and most of the students that I work with here at WPI, that’s why they choose biomedical engineering is because they wanna have an impact on health. They have a loved one, someone who’s close to them, who’s had, or themselves had some health challenges and you know we wanna know how we can do better, right. For humans and animals alike. Actually, there’s a really cool news article recently about a student who’s building a prosthetic leg for their dog who had to have a leg amputation. So a lot of these same skills transferred to veterinary medicine as well, which is also kind of a cool application that a lot of our students are interested in.
Natalie Kuldell (02:08):
That’s very cool. We’ve had a lot of career conversations with folks who were like, well, I wanted to be a vet. And then I switched, I pivoted over to biomedical engineering or something like that. And we’ve also had a lot of times when people have mentioned that being a tool maker is a very satisfying job, but that you have to be, sort of multilingual, like you, you said, right, you have to sort of cross train across the different disciplines. So did you start as an engineer? Or did you start as a scientist?
Marsha Rolle (02:34):
I did not. I actually started as a scientist. I think like most professors, I started out from an interest in research and that was something that I really didn’t discover until late in high school, because I had an opportunity to participate in a hands-on program to do research, kind of like you all are, have a hands on program here. Um, so no, I didn’t. In fact, I had a really excellent biology teacher in high school, who encouraged me to apply to a program at the national laboratories. I’m from Maine originally. I grew up in a small town in Maine. My whole family is, most of my family still lives up in Maine. Um, and I went to a small public high school there and I had a biology teacher who encouraged me to apply to a program where they chose one student per state to go to this program.
Marsha Rolle (03:21):
So there were 50 of us in total and we had a chance to work at one of the national laboratories. We worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is where a lot of the nuclear weapons development was done during the Manhattan project. And so one of the things they’re working on now, or what we were working on back then, which was actually a really long time ago, um, was trying to understand the effects on the environment of storing all the nuclear waste that’s on that site. And so we would do things like take fish and extract their DNA and look at DNA damage to see how or what the impacts were. So from there on that’s when I knew I was hooked and I wanted to do scientific research for a living because I just loved that idea of being able to, you know, see a real world problem, like trying to understand and mitigate the effects of waste and then understand the environmental impacts of it. And so that from then I was hooked.
Natalie Kuldell (04:19):
Oh boy, I can only imagine the number of people who are listening to this and going, yes, that’s exactly what I want. I get that, you know, the notion that you can connect science to a purpose in the world and really be a problem solver for things that matter using science. It’s great. And, you do discover it through these research experiences. I also was very, very lucky in high school to work at the National Institute of Health. I was, you know, one of the lucky few who got to be there and to see that you can use science to solve challenges and to address things in the world that need consideration and bettering. So yeah. How lucky.
Marsha Rolle (05:01):
It was a great experience. Yeah, absolutely.
Natalie Kuldell (05:04):
So cool. So then you were hooked on science and you decided to go study science in college?
Marsha Rolle (05:10):
Yes, yes I did. But I think at that point I still wasn’t really entirely sure what I wanted to do because I think at that point I realized I was really interested in environmental engineering and environmental science. And so I ended up looking at programs that had chemical engineering programs because that’s really a lot of that type of work, the mitigation work and sort of understanding the environmental impacts of our industrial, uh, work that we do, um, and manufacturing. So, being from Maine, I looked at the University of Maine, which has an excellent chemical engineering program. But then I also looked at other schools and was very surprised and excited to get into Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. So, I ultimately decided to go there. I was interested in chemical engineering.
Marsha Rolle (05:56):
At the time they didn’t have much in the way of engineering programs, and one of the things that really struck me when I got to college was, gosh, you know, engineering programs are so prescriptive. There’s so many courses you have to take in a certain order, you have to take them. And I had this love of biology. And so I was afraid that if I couldn’t see where my biology coursework was gonna fit in the curriculum. So I ended up majoring in biochemistry because it was almost like double majoring in biology and chemistry, but I got to have both of those elements. And so, being kind of new to the field and my parents didn’t really know anything about this field. It was a little challenging at first. I remember spending my whole first year and particularly in my science classes thinking, what did they, you know, their admissions committee made this terrible mistake.
Marsha Rolle (06:46):
There’s this little girl from this little town in Maine, who’s here and can’t keep up. I’m not gonna be able to keep up, what am I doing? Um, I had to work multiple jobs to afford it too. You know, work study and that kind of thing. And I was just like overwhelmed, but, you know, I found some study buddies, got some partners, some other students that I worked with and studied with, got settled in, took advantage of help sessions and office hours. And, and I did it. And then by the time my sophomore year rolled around, I realized that, you could actually go and work in research labs with professors. That was not something I was aware of when I started, but one of my good friends from my chemistry classes, one of my study buddies, decided she wanted to be a neurosurgeon.
Marsha Rolle (07:32):
And so she went and volunteered in a neuroscience lab and was doing research. I was like, you can do that? I didn’t even know you could do that. So I was lucky. I went and found, um, there was the Dean of Students Office had this big binder where you could – again, this is how old I am. We actually used paper. Now you would find these things online on a web base, but these big binders, and you could flip through the binders. And every year, every semester, the professors would put a project description of students, things they were working on that they wanted to recruit students. And so, I went and worked in a lab that was studying in cancer. They were trying to understand the chemical pathways, the signal transduction pathway. You might not have covered that yet, but the signaling that happens inside the cell when a cell becomes cancerous. And so I had a chance to work in a lab with graduate students and postdocs and a professor, and that was also kind of the next step in me realizing, yeah, research is what I want to do for a career. I just love being in the lab, the discovery, working with other scientists. I just really liked how hands on and problem solving oriented it was.
Natalie Kuldell (08:33):
Yeah. Yeah. I think that finding a team, whether that’s a research team, whether it’s a study team or, you know, I think that a lot of times we underestimate the importance of that, but in looking back, you see how important those have been, right?
Marsha Rolle (08:53):
Yeah, yeah. Definitely, definitely. Yeah. Find your, find your tribe, find your team early on. It seriously, it does. Well, and I think often times people who don’t really have a lot of exposure to science, don’t realize they have this image of, somebody sitting lonely at a lab bench with a lab coat on just, you know, by themselves. And that’s not really, especially more and more science is a team sport. So, uh, and succeeding in science is a team sport. So, even from college up to graduate school, and even today with the people that I work with collaboratively on research and teaching, it’s a team sport.
Natalie Kuldell (09:30):
So you must bring that into your group that you teach there. Right?
Marsha Rolle (09:36):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I have, in addition to teaching and at WPI, project-based learning and team-based learning is a really important part of our curriculum. Um, and so I’ve developed, had the chance to develop a lot of courses, and advise projects with students who are working on real world scientific and engineering problems. And I could probably spend an hour just talking about those, but I also run a research lab here and I have, I’ve had high school students before, not as many, but I do have college students from WPI, other places. I’ve had students from Quinsigamond Community College. And then I have masters in PhD, students who work in my lab and they are all working on specific projects. And my research is mainly focused on trying to understand vascular disease by building artificial blood vessels in the lab.
Marsha Rolle (10:25):
And then trying to understand how those cell cell and cell matrix or structural interactions affect the mechanics of the tissues, and to try to study how those tissues remodel in response to different types of stress. So what we’re trying to do is basically make little mini clinical trials in a dish in the incubator. So we’re working with cells, not just on 2D culture surfaces, but in three dimensional space where they interact and connect with one another. That’s one of the fun things where engineering comes to science is that, you know, we build these things and then we actually, we break them so we can see how strong they are. So that’s one of the other, and we build all the instrumentation to be able to support the bioreactors, to support those tissues. We’re working on imaging systems now, so we can monitor those tissues. And then also, where engineering comes in is you’re also building the systems to collect information and collect data from those living systems as they’re growing in a bioreactor. And then how do you relate that back to different vascular diseases, like where you get occlusions or aneurysms and an artery we’re trying to model those types of things.
Natalie Kuldell (11:32):
Great. I’ve always felt that science and engineering, they really are just this virtuous cycle, right? You learn something from a scientific inquiry approach and then you try to build something with it. And then you realize something that you could learn again with science and science improves your engineering and the engineering improves your science.
Marsha Rolle (11:50):
You’re absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of there’s is a lot of that cyclical learning, ask a question, test a hypothesis and then kind of going in definitely in a circle where you’re trying to come up with a solution and then testing it in a real world. And we work very closely with companies, medical device companies, and other types of companies, through our project program, as well as with doctors at UMass Medical School and veterinarians at Tufts University has a, the coming school of veterinary medicine is just over in Grafton, a few miles away. So our students will work hand-in-hand with people who are practitioners, people who are out in the real world, so that students get that real world world experience of working on problems that have a, you know, where there’s a, where there’s a real need.
Natalie Kuldell (12:38):
Yeah. Wow. So, just when I thought you couldn’t do more, right. So you’ve got the teaching, you’ve got research, but now you’ve also connecting it back to practitioners, to companies, to physicians, to vets. It’s amazing.
Marsha Rolle (12:52):
That’s what biomedical engineers do.
Natalie Kuldell (12:54):
It’s true. Just make all those connections and yeah. Work in all those different, they’re not separate pillars. So, any advice for keeping so many different projects and things straight and keeping all those plates?
Marsha Rolle (13:09):
Oh boy. Yeah, I get help. That’s something I don’t do nearly enough is identifying when I can have a student be responsible for something or a teammate or somebody who can help me. And I think learning good teamwork skills early on. One of the other things I can do is it can help you get the work done. Sometimes I’m like, oh, I’ve gotta do this all myself. But instead if I get one of my students to help me with something, and they have the opportunity, like for example, you know, the way my lab works is I have PhD students who are working on their dissertation projects, and then they have undergraduate students who work with them. And so they’ll find some piece of their project that the undergraduate students can work on that enables the undergraduate students to learn the lab skills and to learn how to collect and analyze data to learn how to design experiments.
Marsha Rolle (13:57):
And then the PhD students learn teaching and mentorship skills, which will be important to them later in their careers as they go on to lead research teams. So, you know, I don’t have to, do everything I can have, I meet with everybody on a regular basis, but I can have that more day-to-day mentoring be done by the PhD students. So I don’t have to be in the lab every minute. And while also writing the grants to pay for the work and preparing my classes and being in the classroom, there is a lot to balance. But again, that’s where teamwork really is important.
Natalie Kuldell (14:26):
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. And, at BioBuilder, we do a lot of team-based learning. Right. We do a lot of project development where students have to collaborate in order to move a ahead. I do think everybody comes to it with different skill sets, different things that they can learn.
Marsha Rolle (14:41):
Absolutely.
Natalie Kuldell (14:42):
Um, and different opportunities for growth. Right. So, yeah, I am a great admirer of all the work you do. I’m very fortunate to feel like, BioBuilder and your work at WPI. We are connected through a program we’re starting in Worcester and it’s a joy to work with you.
Marsha Rolle (15:01):
Likewise, likewise, it’s been great. I mean, I think one of the things, I mean, I’ve been at WPI now for, this is my 15th year. I’ve seen so many changes in Worcester just in the time since I moved here and I just see such tremendous potential in the biotechnology industry here. Both as biomedical engineers, we think about manufacturing medicines. I mean, you are making the biopharmaceuticals and the vaccines and the gene therapies that are going help treat people, help people beat cancer, help people beat infectious diseases. Like COVID as we’re all well, too aware of, but that’s being able to play a part in that training students who are going to be part of that are gonna be driving new discoveries, new innovations that are gonna create those new therapies and people who are going to be in the lab and building those and ensuring the quality of those products every day, for the benefit of patients. I think it’s an exciting thing to be part of. And, I see so many companies relocating to this region because there are so many talented students here in the region who can fill those roles. So, help those companies make the medicines that are gonna make a difference. So I that’s, I’m just really grateful to be able to be a part of it.
Natalie Kuldell (16:13):
Yep. Me too. Me too. And when I come out to see you, we’re gonna high five it.
Marsha Rolle (16:19):
We will for sure. Yeah, for sure.
Natalie Kuldell (16:22):
Well, thank you so much for taking some time to talk.
Marsha Rolle (16:25):
Absolutely. My pleasure.
Natalie Kuldell (16:25):
Thanks.
Marsha Rolle (16:27):
My pleasure. Thank you.