Mariana Smith

Lab Role:

Undergraduate Student

Email Address:

mariana.e.smith@vanderbilt.edu

Awards:

Excellence in Research Poster Award, Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair: September 2022

SyBBURE Searle Undergraduate Research Program, Funded Student: January 2021 - Present

Subsequent Position:

PhD Student at John Hopkins University

Undergraduate Research Project:

Foldable Laparoscopic Omnidirectional Wrist for Effective Robotic Surgery (FLOWERS)

Projects

Bio-Inspired Robots

Recent News

04/05/2023

Daniel Esser won the Student Abstract Award for his work on steerable acoustic waveguides for targeted delivery of therapeutic ultrasound, which he will be presenting at the International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound (ISTU) in Lyon, France.

04/05/2023

Congratulations to graduate student Piper Cannon and undergraduate Mariana Smith for their awards from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), and to graduate student Jack Peters for his recognition as an Honorable Mention!

02/24/2023

Abby Grillo and Jason Shrand presented their research at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference in San Diego, California! Jack Peters also got to experience his first conference with them to learn about medical imaging.

02/17/2023

Our annual 3-week STEM course that our students teach at Harpeth Hall High School culminated in a field trip to our very own VISE lab! Read more about it at: MED lab’s perennial engineering class for college-bound girls earns praise | Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering | Vanderbilt University

02/08/2023

Vanderbilt School of Engineering just published an article talking about Dr. Webster and his research journey.

02/08/2023

Our Undergraduate researcher Mariana will be presenting her work on diameter-changing continuum robots at the International Symposium on Medical Robotics in April 2023!

01/25/2023

Dr. Webster and start-up, Virtuoso, were featured in the IEEE Pulse article “Robots to Improve Surgery for All”

01/20/2023

Graduate students in the lab (Emily, Abby, Peter, Jesse, Jack, and Piper) led a “Winterim” course during winter break at local all-girls high school, Harpeth Hall. The course, titled ‘STAR (Structures, Technology and Robotics): A Hands-On Engineering Experience,’ taught the girls an array of material ranging from computer aided design (CAD) to building your own electric motors and robotic programming. The course even included a field trip to the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE) where students toured the facility and learned about the exciting research going on there.

12/07/2022

Congratulations to Emily McCabe for her presentation entitled "Autonomous Needle Steering: A Minimally Invasive Surgical Solution In Vivo" She was awarded Honorable Mention for Best Graduate Student Presentation at the annual VISE Symposium. Great work, Emily!

10/20/2022

EndoTheia, Inc., a startup company spun out of the med lab, was awarded Breakthrough Device status by the FDA. It is one of only 7 devices in its clinical area to achieve Breakthrough Device status to date! https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/news/2023/company-co-founded-by-vande...