Scientist's big dream leads to big research

Susmita Bose strives to pass on to her students three important values.

"I tell students you have to have perseverance, stay focused and dream big," said the professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University.

It's those values that led Bose to where she is today.

Bose, 46, grew up in India as a young girl with a passion for chemistry. Now, she is a nationally recognized leader in improving human health through 3-D printing.

In 2002, the National Science Foundation gave her the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, which is the highest honor given to a young scientist by the U.S. president.

This July, she will be recognized as one of three "women to watch in life sciences" by the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association.

Bose's lab uses 3-D printing technology to form bone scaffolds that can help people with bone defects. The scaffold, made of calcium phosphate, aids the bone as it regrows tissue and blood vessels. Once the bone grows back, the scaffold dissolves on its own.

Her students also use the same material to coat metal implants - like the ones used for hip replacements - so it can better bond with the surrounding bones. This coating also prevents the metal material from corroding and leaching into the body over time.

Her work combines multiple fields of research, and she found that taking a multi-disciplined approach to solving problems is key to advancing human health.

"I realized how important it is to address health-related issues from the perspectives of science, engineering and medicine," she said.

Solving health-related issues has fascinated her ever since she was a child in India.

Her mother was a high school math and science teacher, and that inspired Bose to venture into a science career.

She wanted to help people through chemistry, but she knew the road wouldn't be easy.

"My dream, actually, in middle school was to come to the U.S. for higher studies, or for a Ph.D. in the U.S.," she said, adding that such a dream "was a pretty big ambition for me."

But in 1998, she did exactly that when she earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Rutgers University.

She joined her husband, Amit Bandyopadhyay, in coming to WSU, where they both became professors.

During her time in Pullman, she has received three patents for medical devices, earned numerous state and federal grants and published over 200 journal papers.

In her lab, Ph.D. students like Tom Gualtieri and Sahar Vahabzadeh, expertly operate large, complex 3-D printing machines capable of cutting material into precise shapes using a computer program.

According to the WBBA, the work done by her groups over the years have been featured by news networks across the world including BBC, NPR and MSNBC.

But Bose doesn't want to be defined just by her research.

Through focus, big dreams and perseverance, she hopes her students can become faculty members themselves. But most importantly, Bose said, she just wants them to be stand-up people.

"In the end, they have to be good human beings," she said.

Anthony Kuipers can be reached at (208) 883-4640, or by email to akuipers@dnews.com.