Taylor Oeschger
PhD
Biomedical Engineering
Expected Graduation Date: May 2022
Cornell University
If you were at WE19, you may have seen the 1st place winner of the Graduate Collegiate Rapid Fire Competition, Taylor Oeschger!
Taylor has been a member of SWE and been involved with the Cornell GradSWE group since 2017. Starting in 2017, she has served as the Outreach Chair of the Cornell GradSWE Group. In this role she has organized a variety of outreach events focused on the greater Ithaca community. These include a collaboration Habitat for Humanity Women Build, Girl Scout Engineering Day with the Biomedical Engineering Society, and Expanding Your Horizons Youth Outreach. Her favorite bi-annual event is Crochet for Charity where she teaches graduate students to crochet as a stress relief mechanism while making items to donate to various organizations. These have included blankets for the local animal shelter, scarves for the Red Scarf Project, and hats for the local Cancer Resource Center.
In addition to being selected to participate in the 2019 Collegiate Competition at the SWE Annual Conference, Taylor was also selected as a finalist in the Collegiate Competition at WE Local Baltimore in 2019 where she received 1st place. Taylor’s work both in and out of the lab was recognized when she received the 2019 Nellie Yeh-Poh Lin Whetten Memorial Award for commitment to scientific excellence and professional and personal courtesy from Cornell Nanofabrication Facility.
Thesis Topic: Point of Care Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases and Antibiotic Resistance
Taylor’s research focuses on low-cost diagnostics that can be used in limited-resource settings such as rural clinics in developing countries. She first started working on a diagnostic device for sepsis, the body’s drastic response to any kind of infection. In septic patients, infections enter the bloodstream and can cause systemic organ failure. Current diagnostic methods are too slow and non-specific to effectively save lives. Taylor aims to develop a microfluidic chip for Immunochemical Rapid Identification of Sepsis (IRIS) to capture white blood cells that indicate sepsis. Abnormal changes in these white blood cell concentrations can hopefully identify sepsis earlier than other methods, allowing treatment to be administered quickly.
Taylor’s second project focuses on combating the increasing problem of antibiotic resistance. She is developing a micro-volume colorimetric assay for phenotypically testing the susceptibility of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the causative agent in gonorrhea, to clinically-relevant antibiotics. The CDC currently lists gonorrhea as one of the biggest antibiotic threats since it has become resistant to all but one recommended dual antibiotic therapy. If successful, this assay will cost less than $10 and take less than 6 hours to run, potentially opening the door to personalized antibiotic susceptibility testing for gonorrhea patients. This can help delay further development of resistance to last-line antibiotic therapies and delay the time to untreatable gonorrhea infections in the US and across the globe.
After completing her PhD, Taylor hopes to one day run a research lab studying infectious diseases and immunology, most likely in industry or national research laboratories.
Outside of the lab, Taylor is busy collecting hobbies. She loves to knit, crochet, hike, read, cross-stitch, volunteer, build furniture, sew, spin yarn... the list goes on and on.
Fun Fact: In elementary school, Taylor regularly snuck cat food to school in her backpack to feed hungry kittens through the fence.
Twitter: @TaylorOeschger
