Duke BME’s Matt Brown Wins Dream Lab Contest

Each year new engineering students fill Duke BME’s labs ready to learn how to use biomedical equipment and create their own medical tools. This year, students will have even more material to work with, thanks to Matt Brown, a senior laboratory administrator in the biomedical engineering department at Duke University.

Brown was recently named as the winner of the Dream Lab Contest, a competition from Newark element14 that provides more than $20,000 worth of engineering equipment to the winning school.

During the company’s recent Dream Lab promotion, universities across the United States were invited to describe their ‘dream lab’ and discuss how their students could benefit from new engineering equipment. After collecting over 100 applications, Newark element14 selected Matt Brown and Duke BME as their winner, presenting him with a bevy of new tools and a check for $20,000 for additional materials for the lab.

“We’re very grateful to have won this competition,” says Brown. “We’re an educational institution and we’re always looking for more equipment to enable our students to do what they need to do, so we’re grateful to receive these new tools.”

“We’ve been working with Matt for many years, so we were glad to see that he’d won these materials for students at Duke,” says Dan Hill, the president of Newark element14.

As he fills different BME labs in the Chesterfield building with the new equipment, which includes soldering irons, monitors to track vital signs, and even infrared sensors, Brown is excited for the incoming students to practice their engineering skills with the new materials. In addition to the BME users, Brown is also optimistic that students from labs in mechanical engineering and materials science, electrical and computer engineering and civil and environmental engineering will be able to use the tools as well.

“Biomedical engineering is where it’s at right now. It relates to everyone’s health and longevity, and we’re teaching the people who are keeping us healthy and making us live longer,” says Brown. “We’re extremely grateful for anything we can use to help them learn and encourage their progress.”