Faces at Georgia Tech: Marshall scholar emphasizes learning through research

It is rare to find a student at Tech who completed 21 hours both semesters of his freshman year—which put senior Biomedical Engineering major Ryan Haynes well on his way to completion of his degree in just three years’ time.

It is just this sort of dedication to excellence—not only in academics, but in all aspects of his life at school—that helped Haynes become Tech’s seventh recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship last November.

Perhaps it is fitting that Haynes found one of his earliest influences at Tech in his freshman Calculus II TA, 2003 Marshall Scholar Jia Xu.

“My freshman year—it was interesting how it turned out—my first weekend I was on campus, I was at a party when I met a senior Aerospace Engineering [major]. He was telling me all this great stuff he was doing in research, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I want to do.’ Next Tuesday, I go into Calc II recitation, and there he is. He’s my TA.”

When he was growing up, Haynes always said he was going to be a doctor. But when he arrived at Tech, he wasn’t sure if it was just something he always said or something he truthfully wanted to do.

He knew he wanted to gain a broader education than majoring in biology, one of the main reasons he chose to major in biomedical engineering instead.

Wanting to get hands-on experience in the field, Haynes began his research in Assistant Professor Steve Potter’s Laboratory of Neuroengineering his second semester at Tech. Last year, he continued his extracurricular education with clinical experience through working in neuroradiology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“Research gives you the place for all that stuff that you’re learning,” Haynes said. “It completely changes your educational experience, whereas you’re not just learning in a vacuum, which is essentially what you’re doing if you’re just doing class work. Once you’ve been in research, you can say, ‘This is how I apply it to the real world.’”

“It’ll definitely change your whole experience at Tech,” he said.

Haynes’s curiosity and tenacity in his research has paid off. Next fall, he will use his scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge and pursue a master’s degree in nanotechnology enterprises and bio-imaging sciences at Imperial College London.

He attributes his interest in nanotechnology to the importance of its role in medicine in the future and his perfectionist personality.

“It’s one thing where you build something as an engineer and it works, but not quite perfectly. When you get to the molecular level, it fits together one way and only one way. I also think that’s where you’re going to have the most benefit in medicine. When you have nanotechnology and medicine, you can get really, really precise to where you’re targeting your disease. [Medicine today], it’s not really a targeted solution,” Haynes said.

Haynes is grateful for the broad education that the Biomedical Engineering major has provided him so far.

“I’ll notice it at the meetings [at the hospital]. There’ll be a psychologist, radiologist, mathematician…. I’m pretty much the only person there that can talk a little bit of all the languages. The only drawback is, as a biomedical engineer, I don’t feel like I’m an expert in one field, and that’s why I feel like I need a master’s degree—to specialize,” Haynes said.

“But going into research, it’s more and more today that you have to have so many different knowledge bases to bring something in to create a research solution that I think it will be advantageous when I get to the end of what I’m doing,” Haynes said. “I think, eventually, it’ll pay off.”

Haynes’s research for the past few years in Potter’s lab has been analyzing the responses of cultures of neurons when they are exposed to chemicals such as dopamine or glutamate. It is funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse because of the relationship thought to exist between drug addiction and the changes in dopamine pathways in the brain.

At the hospital, Haynes works with software that measures cortical atrophy in the regions of the brain of children that experience epilepsy.

Interestingly enough, Haynes said, there is a connection between the two projects.

“The quieting that we do with the electrical stimulation in the activity in the [culture] dishes—a hypothesis—is that it can be applied to quieting epilepsy. So the idea is getting basic science from the laboratory into the clinical setting. And I think the best way to do that is what’s called translational research…using a business avenue to take basic science and either commercialize it or pull it into a clinical setting.”

Haynes hopes to attain the business understanding through the master’s degree of nanotechnology enterprises, with a course load combination of both physics and business classes.

After his two years in England, Haynes plans to attend medical school and enter the field of radiology.

Haynes is not just known on campus for his research work. First and second year students may know him as a TA of Calculus II (seem familiar?), where he will soon be using a software program he wrote to help teach linear algebra. Reminiscent of a high school project where he developed a distance-learning education program, Haynes was inspired to write, from scratch, a new program; this time aiding independent-learning students learn Calculus II. He plans to use this program this semester.

People often ask Haynes why he didn’t major in Computer Science, since programming seems to come naturally to him. He usually says he just wanted to try to go into a different field.

This does not mean he has entirely abandoned the world of electronics.

“The robot thing was the thing that attracted me [to Potter’s lab] to begin with….I was always interested in artificial intelligence and how the brain works,” Haynes said.