I'm Kalina, a '27 from Sofia, Bulgaria. I love books (I love reading and writing them), and I particularly love fantasy (i.e., I'm an expert on Middle Earth and Hogwarts studies). I'm fascinated by the human brain and the real-world magic of science. I also love hiking, bird-watching, climbing, and em dashes.
Instead of taking a normal Writing 5 course, I decided to fulfill my first-year writing requirement by taking HUM 1. This course helped me strengthen my relationship to literature and writing. It changed the way in which I thought about classics, both books and movies (we saw Wall-E, by the way). And it also changed the way I thought about academic writing and literary criticism. A third of the course was made up of lectures by professors from different departments, while the other two thirds were discussions with a single professor and a small group of 15 students.
Intro to Neuroscience was the first course I was truly excited about. It wasn't an easy course; we had a weekly quiz of ten to thirteen questions covering the lectures from the past few days, but it was very interesting and also very funny (Professor Winter's humor is legendary). We learned about the human brain at the level of individual cells. We also studied it at the level of different systems, from the olfactory system to the parasympathetic nervous system. And last, we learned about cognition: learning, attention, language. We saw a real human brain with formaldehyde dripping from it. We saw a real sheep's brain. And a rat's brain. And we pocked each other with paper clips to determine the sensitivity of our touch receptors.
Journalism with Professor Alexis Jetter was an enjoyable class, sometimes challenging but very satisfying. We covered a lot of US history through the lens of the media, and we started every class with a discussion of the current news and events (thanks to these discussions, I feel like a real adult now—not so lost when the conversation turns toward politics). Several guest lecturers—from former students of Professor Jetter who're now journalists to a New York Times war correspondent—brought us real stories from the field. In the middle of the term, each of us had to find someone over 30 years old in the Upper Valley, spend a day with them, and write a profile.
SummerSofia, Bulgaria
I'm spending my first summer back home, helping my family care for my newborn sister. In my free time (changing diapers takes a lot of time!), I'm doing research for the cognitive neuroscience lab FINN Lab, preparing for my classes in the fall, and working on a new book.
Computational Neuroscience with Professor Richard Granger is a multidisciplinary course taught by a multidisciplinary professor and designed for multidisciplinary thinkers. The class covered brain anatomy and physiology and the biology of learning; it covered linear algebra and the architectures and characteristics of several neural networks. Last, we had a module on "brain engineering"—how some brain circuits function and how we can get inspired by them as engineers.
The first focus of Discrete Math for Computer Science was learning to think like a mathematician: how do we use logic to find proofs to problems and our solutions? Next, we learned how to apply this thinking in computer science contexts — how do you prove that a recursive program works? How do you prove what its run-time is going to be? These were the kind of skills we were building in preparation for the next course in the theoretical computer science sequence: Algorithms. Before we can build algorithms, we need to know how to think about the steps we need to take to solve problems with the rigor of mathematical logic.
Last spring, I took part in the Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Digital Health. I had the chance to learn about many biomedical startups at Dartmouth and meet some of the faculty and students working on them.
The story of one startup, however, stuck with me. PixCell and the idea of a device (the SmartScope) that mimics the experience of using a medical microscope but actually allows for digital processing of tissue images, lived rent-free at the back of my mind through summer break and the fall term.
This term, Winter 2025, I finally decided to pursue this story, and I had the chance to meet with Dr. Aravindhan Sriharan, a pathologist at Dartmouth Health, an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Geisel School of Medicine (Dartmouth's medical school), and the founder of PixCell.
Dr. Aravindhan Sriharan (photo courtesy of Dr. Sriharan)
Dr. Sriharan was born in Sri Lanka to a family of physicians, but the start of the Sri Lankan civil war soon forced his family to leave the country. At first, they relocated to Papua New Guinea. However, Dr. Sriharan's father valued education above everything and wanted his kids to have the best opportunities possible, so the family left the warm community of their town and the paradise-like island of New Guinea for a small, one-bedroom apartment in Kentucky, but much better access to quality education.
Early in college, Dr. Sriharan's passion was physics. If you asked him back then what his future career would be, he'd have probably told you that he'd go to grad school to study physics, but that's not where life took him.
He went to medical school instead. As a child, Dr. Sriharan accompanied his father on trips back to Sri Lanka—trips on which his dad brought a suitcase full of medical supplies for whoever needed them. Early on, Dr. Sriharan felt the impact medicine could have on those who needed it most.
So, he pursued pathology.
After finishing his studies, Dr. Sriharan obtained a faculty position, and life was good: his family was stable; they were no longer running away from war; he had the education his father had hoped for… For most people, this would be their happy ending.
But Dr. Sriharan remembered another lesson his father had taught him–the lesson of Archimedes, who said, "Give me a place to stand and with a lever, I'll move the whole world." Dr. Sriharan had a place to stand, so it was time for him to pay forward his success.
Dr. Sriharan noticed a gap in pathology's potential to effectively and efficiently help unprivileged patients. Pathology could be much more effective if it was digital.
"We could use AI algorithms, we could help patients abroad," said Dr. Sriharan, "[but] out of the tens of thousands of labs in the US, less than five percent of biopsies are signed out digitally."
And yet, going through a digitized image of a slide on a computer isn't easy or time efficient.
"For me, as a pathologist holding a glass slide," Dr. Sriharan said, "I can go through it much faster and much more comfortably [on a microscope] than I can on a computer screen."
Reaping the benefits of technology in pathology required a different approach: "What if we just built something that looks like what [doctors] are used to, [a microscope], but gives them the power of the new technology?" Dr. Sriharan asked.
That's what PixCell's SmartScope is: a device that provides access to digital images and AI but has the form of a traditional microscope. "Pathologists peer into the scope and manipulate the image using a dummy slide, rather than a mouse," explains Kelly Burch in her article "DALI Lab's SmartScope Marries Physical Design and Technology in Unique Project."
Building a functioning prototype of the Smartscope wasn't easy—and it wasn't easy to find the right engineers.
"I looked and looked at engineering firms all up and down the eastern seaboard, throughout different parts of the US," Dr. Sriharan said.
However, none of the engineers he spoke to responded with much enthusiasm or even understanding of what the SmartScope had to be. He didn't know, at the beginning of his search, that the engineers who'd help him build the SmartScope were already at Dartmouth: the students at DALI Lab (Digital Applied Learning and Innovation lab at Dartmouth). Dr. Sriharan was immediately delighted by how "forward thinking" and "solution-oriented" the students he met at DALI were.
"It was just a wonderful creative energy that the students and their supervising faculty had," he said.
Dr. Sriharan met with his team of DALI engineers every week, going over prototype requirements and his vision for the SmartScope. It's a big feat for any team to build a functional prototype of a machine like this in ten weeks, but Dr. Sriharan's student engineers "pulled it off beautifully."
"At the end of that first term," Dr. Sriharan said proudly, "we had a functional prototype of exactly what I had in mind."
Some students have been with Dr. Sriharan for multiple terms, "iterating the hardware and the software and doing design for manufacturing." One student has been on the team for ten terms.
PixCell won the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer. It has received grant money from the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship to keep on developing its product. Now, they're waiting on a government grant that will allow them to team up with Dartmouth Health and a number of other prestigious medical schools, clinics, and labs across the country to keep perfecting the SmartScope and reaching more patients. PixCell also has a partner in Tanzania: a hospital that would digitize their pathology cases and send them over, so that volunteer Dartmouth Health pathologists can look at them on the SmartScope and offer their advice and expertise.
Of course, at the very beginning, Dr. Sriharan and his team didn't start out envisioning all these partnerships and successes. What they did was simply say, "Okay, in ten weeks, we're going to have these features built…"
And that's how PixCell was built: step by step, one ten-week-term after another. And they'll keep doing this, term after term until they've reached their place to stand. Give PixCell a place to stand, and with the SmartScope, they'll move the world.
What is happening on campus over the winterim? In my last blog, I talked about myself participating in the TuckLAB energy program, and in this blog, I interviewed a friend who also spent some time on campus over the interim.
Don't know what to bring for a Dartmouth winter? Stressed about how to dress for the cold and snow? Look no further than this blog post, where I share my tips and tricks to dress for wintery Hanover.
