5 minute read
Olivia Calkins '24
OLIVIA CALKINS ’24
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING MAJOR WITH A MINOR IN FOOD SYSTEMS & NUTRITION FROM EAST LONGMEADOW, MA
When I sat down with Olivia at a table in the busy Joyce Cummings Center, she had just finished her work for the day at the Kaplan Lab, a research group she’s been highly involved in over the past year. Even so, she was bustling with energy and enthusiasm to share her excitement for Tufts.
Olivia first fell in love with the idea of engineering in middle school through her involvement with a club called Future City, a hands-on, interdisciplinary educational program that puts engineering design processes and project management skills to the test and prompts students to craft a solution to a citywide sustainability issue. “That’s when I first knew I wanted to engineer for the environment.”
Coming into Tufts, she initially limited herself to environmental engineering as the only major that would enable her to follow such a dream. After discovering the emerging field of cellular agriculture (“cell ag”) in a class with biomedical engineering professor David Kaplan, whose recent achievements include securing a $10 million grant for research into the development of cultivated meat, during her freshman year, Olivia’s mind was blown. “I thought [Kaplan’s research] was the coolest thing because I’m vegan—I care about animals and I also care about the Earth. This whole concept of growing cells to replace our current means of harvesting—I thought that was the coolest way to apply engineering for the environment and for the animals.”
Immediately after that class, she had multiple conversations with Kaplan about major alternatives. After all, she found that environmental engineering is not as involved with cell ag as she anticipated, and her interest in biomedical engineering focuses more on the cell culture and lab-grown meat side over prosthetics and optics. What was the final verdict, then? “He suggested chemical engineering because it’d be the best way for me to get a general introduction to engineering and also be able to focus on the biological side.”
From there, Olivia became close friends not only with her residence hall neighbors but also with her cohort of chemical engineering students, whom she affectionately refers to as her most close-knit group—and favorite people—on campus. “Being together from 9:00 a.m. morning classes to 6:00 p.m. lab sections nourished a supportive community that allowed us to become super, super close.” Most of them joined the American Institute of Chemical Engineers chapter at Tufts, where they met a lot of student mentors who have given advice and resources on classes, internships, and other activities on campus.
Outside of class, Olivia also goes on walks, cooks vegan food, and dabbles in research. She started working with the Kaplan Lab the summer after her freshman year where she shadowed some of the PhD student-led cell ag projects before tackling small and big projects on her own. For one, her sophomore spring semester centered on speeding up bovine cow satellite cell growth via the endocannabinoid system to match a hypothetical demand of a cultured meat product that can feed billions of people.
She then received funding from the Laidlaw Scholars Program to explore the use of insect cells as a replacement for meat in pet food and achieve a complete nutritional profile for felines, tying into her minor in Food Systems and Nutrition. For the second year of the program, she plans to travel to Costa Rica and promote educational outreach on the growing demand of tissue engineering to K–12 students. Her choice was inspired by a foreign exchange student friend of hers in high school whose father works as an educator.
If you’re already amazed at how much Olivia has done on campus, listen to this: she also started a club called the Alt Protein Project this year. Over time, she obtained the support of the nonprofit think tank Good Food Institute through monthly calls, networking opportunities, and cross-university partnerships with UC Davis, Virginia Tech, and several European universities. She also has experience interning at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, making seemingly intimidating concepts like cell culture more accessible and enjoyable via informative YouTube videos and TikTok clips.
With all these moving pieces, what’s her secret? “I really, really care. I’m very personally motivated in terms of cell ag. I care a lot about animal welfare and the environment. Working in these areas of leadership, research, and outreach feels like I’m doing what I want to do. It’s a great outlet because sometimes when I’m doing my work in class, I think, ‘this is so hard…this is so tedious.’ With these extracurricular outlets, it genuinely feels like I’m doing it all for fun and for myself. My end goal is to work with cell ag, so getting to actually apply what I’ve learned in chemical engineering has been very rewarding—knowing that I’m learning stuff that I will be using in the future.”
