Navigating Difficult Topics w/ Ti'Air Riggins

Grad Chat

This week, we will be joined by Ti'Air Riggins (she/her).

Ti’Air Riggins is a current Biomedical Engineering PhD researcher at Case Western Reserve University who just became the first Black Biomedical Engineering PhD recipient from MSU. She received her bachelors in Biomedical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2011, also becoming the first black undergraduate student to receive a bachelors in science in BME from OSU, and proceeded to earn a master’s from the University of Cincinnati in 2013. Beginning her PhD at Purdue in 2014, she transferred to Michigan State in January 2019. Her research focus is integrating tissue engineering with implantable electrodes to tune immune response in the brain, in the REIL lab under the direction of Dr. Erin Purcell. She is a co-founder for Black In Neuro, serves as the Academia Chair for the Health Innovations special interest group of the National Society of Black Engineers, is a local organizer for Com Sci Con MI, and is in the speaker’s bureau for the Rape And Incest National Network. She has also served in the community under her platforms of sexual assault awareness and exposing underrepresented students to STEM as Miss Indiana United States 2015 and has received awards for her Social Justice in 2016 and Humanitarianism in 2018. She was named a fellow in the Society for Neuroscience from 2016 – 2018 and is also a NIH F99/K00 fellowship awardee. She just accepted a postdoc position in the Capadona lab at Case Western Reserve University where she will do her K00 funded research. Her future goals include managing her own lab exploring neurodegeneration and foreign body response to brain computer interfaces and being a successful educator and mentor for students who are underrepresented students in neuroscience and engineering.

A full-text transcript of this episode is available via google doc.

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