Alumni Profile: Chibuike Uwakwe, A.B. '23

Growing up in North Carolina, Chibuike Uwakwe loved science and engineering and creative arts such as fashion and music. He was one of several students around the nation to receive a scholarship established by Virgil Abloh, a Black fashion designer, and also won multiple awards as a concert pianist, including one from Omega Psi Phi, the first fraternity established at a historically Black university.

His interest in science and medicine came from working in his family’s pharmacy. He also took on a high school summer internship at Duke University, helping develop E. coli bacteria capable of producing diabetic drugs for targeted therapy.

“When you combine art and engineering, I think you come up with really fascinating and also innovative technologies,” he said. “Humans are drawn to create, and when you create something and you build it yourself and then you see that it works and sometimes it works in ways that you hadn't imagined, I think that's super compelling. And then on the art side, producing beauty as a form of self-expression, or to embody an emotion, was gratifying to me.”

A chance to explore both science and the humanities ultimately sold Uwakwe on the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). While here, he pursued everything he was interested in: working as an undergraduate research and teaching assistant for two bioengineering classes; designing a piece for the REEF Makerspace’s Marine Debris Fashion Show at SEAS; being part of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and president of the Harvard College Piano Society; writing for the Crimson as an Arts Editor and Culture Executive; joining the Black Students Association and Nigerian Students Association; and eventually getting selected as a Marshal for the Class of 2023.

“There were a lot of blended disciplines that you could go into as a Harvard student, so I could participate in really rigorous engineering research at SEAS, while also doing a secondary in music and participating in all these music organizations,” he said. “I was also drawn to the emphasis on application at SEAS. The curriculum really focuses on how we can apply it to real outcomes, how we can create something for people.”

Following his second year as a biomedical engineering concentrator here, Uwakwe took on a summer internship at California Institute of Technology. The internship proved essential to Uwakwe’s future, as it was his first real exposure to the field of wearable technology. He helped develop wearable biosensors capable of drawing information from human sweat at Caltech. 

“I was thinking about technologies and medical devices that could be seamlessly integrated into patients' lives, because those are the ones that patients will actually use,” Uwakwe said. “I felt that wearable technology fit well into that category as something that is super accessible and also could be seamlessly integrated into a patient's life.”

When he returned to SEAS for his third year in the fall, Uwakwe, A.B. '23, began to focus more and more on wearables. He became an undergraduate researcher in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, led by Robert Wood, Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He worked closely with Vanessa Sanchez, a Ph.D. student at the time who was focusing on soft robotics and wearable tech.

“Vanessa's really the one that drew me to that lab and who I was particularly interested in working with,” Uwakwe said. “A lot of my work in the Rob Wood Lab involved pursuing material science and engineering electronic textiles, which I thought were especially novel.”

Uwakwe continues to push the frontiers of wearable technology. He’s about to start his third year at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he’s pursuing a joint MD-Ph.D. in bioengineering. His lab, the Zhenan Bao Group, develops flexible materials and wearable devices inspired by human skin.

“I wanted to go into medicine because I love science and I love people, and I think it's the perfect combination in a career,” he said. “With the Bao Group, what I was really interested in first of all was focusing on engineering wearable bioelectronics for continuous physiological monitoring and therapeutics.”

For Uwakwe, combining art and engineering can also have therapeutic benefits. Wearable technology isn’t like a pill you take alone in your bathroom – if you’re wearing an exosuit or a biosensor, it’s likely that others will see it. If it doesn’t look good, a patient might not wear it enough.

“That's the core of why I'm influenced by art and fashion,” he said. “The aesthetics and the comfortability are some of the most important factors ensuring that patients actually want to integrate a piece of technology into their lives.”

Uwakwe’s first two years in the Stanford MD-Ph.D. program focused on medical coursework, so he’s only now starting to plan out his Ph.D. dissertation. Though he’s still defining the scope of his project, he wants to focus on wearable devices that can detect multiple electrochemical and physiological signals in the human body.

“Being able to integrate multiple types of signals, such as chemical, electrical or neurological signals, to investigate complex physiological processes is something I'm really interested in,” he said. “By complex physiological processes, I mean things that are really, really hard to elucidate, such as pain, which combines a lot of different domains and is incredibly hard to quantify and understand. Having a wearable that can get these different types of multimodal data could help us understand it more.”

Uwakwe’s long-term goal is to pursue medicine while continuing to do academic research. He envisions staying in academia, ideally at a medical school that would allow him to see patients while also running his own research laboratory, which would develop potentially commercializable wearable tech. Those goals are in part motivated by his experiences as a researcher at SEAS.

“I don’t think I would even be on this path if I hadn't chosen Harvard, a place where I was able to explore my passions with rigor,” he said. “During my research at Harvard, I couldn't stay away from the philosophy of just pursuing knowledge and innovation for the sake of it. That freedom and agency to pursue what you are really interested in is unique to academia. My experiences at Harvard, and research particularly, reinforced that idea and made me strongly consider a long-term career in academia as well.”