Hamsa Gowda is a PhD Candidate in the bioMEMS lab, co-advised by Dr. Sunny Jiang and Marc Madou. She is working on centrifugal microfluidic devices with the aim of miniaturizing laboratory techniques to be used in low resource environments. We discuss scientific collaboration the hurdles of translating academic research into industry and clinical settings, scientific outreach, and the importance of building a community and social support network for yourself in graduate school.