Kyrstyn Ong

I first became interested in pursuing a scientific career after working for Yerkes Observatory in my hometown of Williams Bay, Wisconsin. In my senior year, I went to the observatory every day after school to process asteroid images, which entailed searching time-lapse images for moving objects as part of the International Astronomical Search collaboration. I also remotely controlled a telescope in Sonoma, California, to record observations of different astronomical objects. That was my first exposure to scientific research. Now, I’m in the final year of my PhD in Materials Science and Engineering.

I work in Dr. Stephen Baccus’s lab in the neurobiology department in the School of Medicine, and my research investigates how focused ultrasound stimulation affects neural activity. Ultrasound has long been used in medical imaging, but it can also directly modulate the nervous system by exciting or inhibiting neurons. Overall, the motivation for my work is that ultrasonic stimulation is a promising treatment for many neurological and psychiatric disorders including chronic pain and schizophrenia. It is currently being tested in clinical trials for both. To predict the effect of ultrasound on cells, I have performed nanoscale simulations on supercomputers including Stanford’s Sherlock and Marlowe. I have then validated my predictions with cell culture experiments. 

Over the course of my time at Stanford, I’ve benefited from many great campus resources including the Technical Communication Program (TCP). TCP is a resource center offered by the School of Engineering that helps students polish their academic writing and public speaking skills. In my first year here, I attended a workshop offered by TCP on writing fellowship applications and learned that we could request individual consultations or take a class for weekly consultations to work on a larger writing project. By taking ENGR 202S with Jill O’Nan, I learned how to write more effective grants, convey research goals through presentations, simplify complex technical jargon into language more accessible to people outside my field, and even compose clearer captions for scientific figures. TCP has been an invaluable resource to improve communication skills that are highly relevant to my future research career.

I’ll miss so much about my time at Stanford, including learning from my advisor and my labmates, taking classes in many different fields, having an opportunity to present at multiple conferences, attending a myriad of exciting research seminars across departments, participating in the Data Best Practices workshops, and even dining at the Coupa Café. I think I’ve tried almost everything on the menu there at this point. My immediate plan after graduating is to apply for a postdoctoral position. I’d love to pursue a research career that allows me to contribute to the development of neurotechnology, of which ultrasonic stimulation is one of the many emerging forms.