ESP Biography



DEVANY WEST, Biological Engineering Student at MIT




Major: 20

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: 2018

Picture of Devany West

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I spend a lot of time in lab hijacking viruses and DNA to do my bidding, namely to make cool stuff like batteries and materials for cancer imaging or drug delivery! I'm pretty interested in how organisms have evolved to create fancy biological materials and how we can use those biological materials for our own purposes. I also think dunkleosteus is excellent, prions are terrifying, and slime mold is oddly adorable. Outside the lab I'm a ballet dancer, a French horn player, and am perpetually listening to music.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

S11547: What even is life? in Splash 2017 (Nov. 18 - 19, 2017)
What is life? No really, it isn't as simple an answer as you might think. We'll talk about what the definition of life is and then try to break it by talking about all of the examples that fall in between. We'll also touch on what sorts of signs of life exobiologists look for when searching for life on other planets!


S10518: (Not So) Close Encounters of a Third Kind (That we haven't found yet) in HSSP Summer 2016 (Jul. 10, 2016)
Is there life on other planets? How could we find it? How can we even find other planets? And how did life begin on earth in the first place? So many questions, and we'll try to come up with some answers while nerding out about the satellites and other stuff!