Alumni Series: Women in Engineering – meet Andrea Villaroman

• BEng in Chemical and Bioproduct Engineering (2013), HKUST
• Master of Translational Medicine (2014), UC Berkeley-UC San Francisco
• First US undergraduate student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at HKUST
• Currently Clinical Research Coordinator and Project Manager at UC San Francisco
   

Andrea Villaroman is the first undergraduate student from the US in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBME) at HKUST, graduating in 2013. She is now working in the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as Clinical Research Coordinator and Project Manager. 

1. Engineering has traditionally been a male-dominated profession. Why did you choose to study engineering for your undergraduate studies? 

At the time I had to choose my undergraduate discipline, I had medicine and engineering in mind. My preference was a discipline in which I could spend less time studying and more time serving people. In the US, medicine means at least eight years of studying before you can serve people – this was too long for me. So I chose engineering. 

I also found that as an engineer, I can make a great contribution to the medical field where critical thinking and innovation are paramount. For instance, I can make solid improvements to the electronic medical record systems. Also, clinical engineers can improve the layout of hospitals and the clinical workflow. 

2. Why did you choose to come to Hong Kong for your undergraduate studies? 

By nature I am adventurous and I had always looked forward to studying abroad. So upon completion of high school, I started to apply for universities abroad. Hong Kong is the heart of Asia and a place of East meets West. In addition, it has a flexible admission system which accepted both my SAT and AP scores and the language of instruction is English, which is my native tongue. 

After submitting my application at HKUST, I had a lot of communication with Prof Ying Chau, who gave me great encouragement and I was even offered a full-tuition scholarship. 

3. What did you find most memorable about your days at SENG? 

We had some very unusual experiences, like buying pig hearts from the wet market for experiments, visiting a neurological unit in a hospital, and of course winning the Silver Award in the HKUST President’s Cup! 

In my soul searching, I received a lot of guidance from Prof Ying Chau and Prof Henry Lam. Both believed in my potential and provided solid support when I faced various difficulties in Hong Kong. Indeed, the hours they spent on me guiding me through my academic and personal life were a million times more valuable than any recommendation letter they wrote for me. Because of their influence, I decided to accept, among other attractive graduate school options, an offer at a joint UC San Francisco / UC Berkeley program (Master of Translational Medicine) which placed me at the heart of engineering, healthcare and business disciplines in the dynamic and innovative San Francisco Bay Area. 

4. What exactly do you do now? 

The San Francisco Bay Area is a funny place – almost everyone knows, or wants to learn, a programming language. In my current position as Clinical Research Coordinator at UCSF, I manage our databases using SQL, a very important project in my lab, and I have started my own data analysis project using Python. Actually, neither SQL nor Python were skills I learned in my undergraduate studies in chemical engineering. So I am learning on the job, but I know full well that the experience will be valuable in our future, which is very much driven by technology and data. I see biomolecular engineering and biotechnology principles in action but I look at them from a patient- and data-driven perspective.

It also happens that UCSF is very close to hospitals and patients, which are the targets I am going to serve in my career. After completing my master’s degree, I knew I wanted to shift my focus from pure engineering to a more patient-oriented world, such as clinical research. 

So in short, you can say that my general goals are to enter hospital leadership and bring more engineering talent onto the frontlines of healthcare. 

5. How did you get to where you are now, after graduation from HKUST?

I grew up in California so the US is my home. I had always wanted to move back and be an example to others. 

I graduated from my undergrad studies at HKUST in May 2013 and went straight to a one-year master’s program jointly organized by UCSF and UC Berkeley. So I attended two graduation ceremonies! I have been working at UCSF for a year and I love the fact that I am at a teaching hospital where so much innovation takes place. 

6. Could you quote an interesting achievement? 

Sure! With the guidance of my previous boss at UCSF, I implemented and launched a pilot platform for eye cancer patients to log in and report how they are feeling. This data, called Patient Reported Outcomes, would be sent to our doctors for analysis with an aim to improve the quality of their care. Riding on this achievement, I was invited to Paris to give a presentation at the International Society of Ocular Oncology Conference Working Day. 

7. What are your current projects and your next step forward? 

The project I am now managing is called SuperAlarm, and we are creating a platform that will help predict cardiac arrests in intensive care units (ICUs) before they occur. If the project goes well, I may be entering the startup world. After that, I will consider furthering my education. For instance a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, but that will be far on my horizon. 

The objective of the SuperAlarm project is to reduce alarm fatigue in hospitals. If you have been to an ICU, you will hear beeps all the time. When patients are put on monitors, if anything physiologically changes that goes beyond the normal threshold of, say, their heart rate or breathing rate, the alarm will go off. As ICU patients are suffering from a lot of abnormalities, the alarm goes off all the time. And because of this, the doctors and nurses tend to ignore these alarms because they just cannot cope with all of them (information overload!). And this may have dire consequences.

So the SuperAlarm project aims to reduce the number of these alarms by combining the monitor data and coming up with patterns using a machine learning approach. For instance, if a patient has had a cardiac arrest in the ICU, and they have a different sequence of alarms that is different from the control patients, the SuperAlarm platform will alert the doctor or nurse to pay close attention.

I joined my current lab because I had experience working with the electronic medical records in ocular oncology. So my professor wanted to train me further to be more of a data scientist and learn to analyze clinical data, and because I desired project management experience, he assigned me to manage this project.

My main focus is in healthcare technology, and with the rapid development of informatics, big data, and computer-user interaction, the healthcare system will be radically different a decade from now. 

8. How do you feel about being a woman in engineering?

I am proud of this. Women typically have good communication skills and right now there is a great need for communicators between the engineering and clinical fields. Engineers primarily care about the science and data, while clinicians are more concerned about patients. So this is where I come in, as a bridge between both disciplines.

Now, my lab is very international in nature, and my experience at HKUST (a very international university) helps a lot in being an international communicator. It really helped that the CBME Department was and is very diverse, with a lot of international and female students.