Raul Quintero

Undergraduate Student
Biomedical Engineering Major

Bio: I am currently a third-biomedical engineering major with a minor in mathematics. My goal is to be able to create affordable medical technology so that low income communities like mine can benefit from the innovations of biomedical engineering. I would like to achieve this goal by pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering. I have interests in cardiovascular engineering as well as bioinformatics. Outside of class, I participate in the red cross club and reading literature.

Project Description: In women, the phase of the menstrual cycle affects vascular function, specifically influencing the stiffness of large elastic arteries and endothelial function. With this in mind, the proper design of rodent studies involving females should recognize the hormonal fluctuations throughout the estrous cycle and make intentional decisions about whether to account for these variations. My objective is to identify methods (on mice) to detect hormones primarily estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone so that we can categorize them by what phase of the estrous cycle the mice are on. This is done by collecting serum (blood) from mice (n=12). My project will be to design a procedure to prepare the serum to be able to be used by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LCMS). From there I will work on a code to analyze the results from the LCMS so that we can quantify the hormone levels in these mice and compare the results with other experiments. We will also check our findings using visual observations of the mice, uterus weights, and vaginal cytology to confirm the estrus phase. This will allow us to account for the estrous cycle in future experiments.