Bertila Bruka

Bertila Bruka is a second-year biomedical engineering major at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. She recently transferred from Bergen Community College (BCC). While at BCC, Bertila was a director of recruitment for the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society and the vice president of Bergen Pre-Health, where she created a mentoring program for underrepresented students interested in the medical field with the help of MD-PhD students from Columbia University. She was also the team leader of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), a research team that aims to understand the connection between brain and muscle signals. Bertila dedicated her second year at BCC to tutoring mathematics, physics, and biology and publishing her first research article in the BCC STEM journal. As a Jack Kent Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholar, Bertila wishes to give back to the community by researching the hybridization of BCI systems and their application in everyday life and 3D printing artificial hearts using biomaterials for costless cardiac transplants. Bertila would also like to study and further explore myocardial regeneration and stem cell repair, potentially reducing the wait time for life-saving heart transplants.