In this last part of a five-part series, the five undergraduate members of the Optical Coherence Tomography and Vibrometry Endoscope (OCTAVE) team describe the success factors that helped them turn their Senior Design project into an award-winning, innovative tool that could revolutionize hearing-loss diagnostics. Team bonding, emotional intelligence, and mutual respect were among some of the factors that helped the team reach levels of achievement that were "nothing short of extraordinary."

Chris Clark, Sofia Gandarilla, Briana Marquez, Minh-Huy (Huy) Tran, and Alexis Valencia achieved two feats of engineering.

First, these five undergraduates from the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) redesigned a bulky assembly of lasers, mirrors, and lenses that could transform the way certain types of hearing loss is diagnosed and treated by clinicians. 

Second, these Department of Bioengineering students built a super-team culture that turbo-charged their success.

As members of a Senior Design Showcase team, the students revamped an Optical Coherence Tomography and Vibrometry Endoscope (OCTAVE) from the lab of Hyle Park, associate professor of bioengineering.

By shrinking the prototype from about 20 pounds to less than a pound-and-a-half, the team brought the device closer to market and earned a second-place National Institutes of Health (NIH) Design by Biomedical Undergraduate (DEBUT) Award for excellence in biomedical design and innovation.

As Tran noted, such success is rare: The last time a UC Riverside (UCR) team placed in the top 3 in the DEBUT challenge was in 2014. 

For his part, Park praised the students’ initiative, perseverance and teamwork.

“I can’t remember ever needing to ask them to work harder or produce better results," he said. 

Of course, the students had guidance, expertise, funding, supplies, equipment, and other support from their faculty mentors, BCOE and UCR, and their academic sponsor, the Veterans Affairs (VA) Loma Linda Healthcare System. 

But the team also had a special compatibility — a super-team culture that they cultivated, tended, and watched sprout, grow, and bloom.

How did they do it? What traits, qualities and dynamics helped make them exceptional? And what can other teams learn from their success?

Emotional intelligence was one of those qualities. 

“The team as a whole listened to, thought through, and incorporated feedback both positive and critical,” said Rob McKee, a bioengineering assistant professor of teaching and Senior Design instructor. “Whether the critical feedback came from teammates, peers in the class, collaborators, teaching assistants (TAs), or the instructors, they demonstrated the increasingly rare ability to not get bent out of shape, dissuaded, or feeling personally wronged, and instead sought clarity on the critical feedback, digested it, and used it to improve.”

“This is something a lot of individuals struggle with but these five students succeeded at this to a truly incredible degree,” he added.

The ability to clearly distinguish the best option among competing ones, or discernment, was another crucial ingredient to the team’s success.

“When you have five smart people on a team trying to tackle a complex project, many ideas get created, but for any given problem you only get to choose one solution,” Clark said. “It takes discernment to cut through the infinite [number of] possible ways of solving a problem and pick the best solution each step of the way.”

“If we did not cut out the inefficient or impractical ideas early on, we would not have the same device you see today and likely would not have the same success,” he added. 

As teammates, mutual respect and support for one another also proved a critical factor.

“At the beginning of the design phase of the project, I was largely unfamiliar with the design software we were using at the time,” Gandarilla said “After a long day of classes, Chris generously stayed behind for several hours to teach me how to use the software basics, step by step. This helped me tremendously in terms of staying on track with my designs.”

Gandarilla said that throughout the OCTAVE project, teammates worked in pairs or small groups. She often collaborated with Marquez, adding that “we supported each other not only in our project but also in our academic and personal lives.”

They also made the work enjoyable by holding design days at local coffee shops and organizing study sessions for exams.

“These experiences highlight the progress we made because we could rely on one another for help when needed,” Gandarilla said. “For example, when we had individual interviews for the course, those of us who interviewed first helped the others prepare as thoroughly as possible. Our team embraced the idea that when one of us succeeded, we all succeeded, and this principle guided us throughout the project.”

Passion and buy-in for the project were other contributing factors to team success. 

“This was different from other group projects because everyone bought in,” Marquez said. “In this case, all five of us were really passionate about the topic we were researching. So we all wanted to contribute, and we all did. That really helped with the research and the outcome.”

From the beginning, the entire team was keenly aware of the end goal and who they were trying to help: revolutionizing diagnostics to help those dealing with conductive hearing loss, or hearing loss that occurs when sound waves are blocked from reaching the inner ear due to problems or damage to the middle ear.

“Everyone in our group was passionate about improving people’s lives and hearing, and advancing the technology in an area of medicine where there have been few options for diagnostics and treatment,” Marquez said.

Tran cited team bonding that manifested in many ways as another success factor. The whole team frequently met every quarter to work on the project as well as outside of class. 

“We had a team trip to Joshua Tree, and went out to eat to celebrate our successes or our failures,” he said. “We bonded when we went to the Summer Bioengineering, Biomechanics, and Biotransport Conference as a team. We took graduation photos together in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and went to eat together as a team when we had free time. I genuinely attribute much of our success to our team bonding because our team synergy and dynamic improved dramatically.”

Gandarilla echoed Tran’s views on how the group benefited from team bonding.

“Our group was definitely close as we enjoyed road trips, parties, and fun times, as well as stress and shared anxieties,” she said. “No matter the hardships we went through, we would struggle through it together and come out successful. I will undoubtedly take the standard we had in our group and try to improve it on my own to apply it to the next group project I am a part of.”

In addition to team bonding, Tran added that other factors that he felt benefited his teammates were honest communication, grit, open-mindedness, and support, facilities and equipment they were provided through Park’s lab, VA Loma Linda, and UCR’s XCITE Center for Teaching and Learning.

For Gandarilla, a sense of “team-friendly competition” was a main driving factor for her.

“Something that pushed my design skills was that we set a specific date for our version of the design to be implemented on the device,” she said. “This is how I came up with the idea of the miniature optomechanical components as I took into consideration the manufacturing tolerances of the 3D printers. To make the most accurate models, I took the lens models provided by Thorlabs, where we acquired the lenses, and molded the design around them. Apart from being a fun challenge, it allowed us to display our design to the whole team and agree on which part should be used. Of course, being chosen also required making modifications suggested by others, which helped improve the overall structure of the device.”

Looking forward, the teammates have cultivated skills that will serve them for a lifetime.

McKee, in a LinkedIn post addressing the group’s NIH DEBUT award last fall, described the team’s design achievements as “nothing short of extraordinary.”

“You have set a high bar for future cohorts and I am elated that others are recognizing your hard work,” he wrote. “The future of bioengineering is in great hands.”

This story is the fifth part in a five-part series. You can read the other parts below:
The Sound of Success Part 1 - How a team of bioengineering students turned a Senior Design project into an innovative diagnostic tool for hearing loss.
The Sound of Success Part 2 - Student engineers say friendship, adventure marked their experiences designing a hearing-loss innovation.
The Sound of Success Part 3 - Student engineers overcame multiple design, fabrication, software challenges to refine and bring their project to life.
The Sound of Success Part 4 - Faculty and industry support were critical in helping bioengineering students reap the rewards of their redesigned diagnostics tool.

Header image: