Hi! My name is Allie Speidel. I graduated from Duke with a BSE in Biomedical Engineering. From the moment I set foot on Duke's campus I felt like I was in a safe haven, a comfortable place where I could learn how to more fully unearth the identity of the question that I had been seeking to dedicate my life to. Duke not only introduced me to useful formulas and methods of analysis that can predict the response of bodily tissues to a specific stimulus, it more importantly, taught me how to learn. I have been able to seize the opportunity to relish and personally tackle the intellectual process. At Duke, I was able to foster each of my interests into passions. Through the Baldwin Scholars I met 125 other girls with similar goals of finding out who they are and making their mark on the world. I have been inspired and challenged by each and every one of them. I can easily say that applying to become a Baldwin scholar has been one of the best decisions I made since I decided to come Duke.
After graduating from Duke, I completed my PhD in cardiac tissue engineering at Imperial College London under a Marshall Scholarship. I then spent a year as a Luce Fellow at Tokyo Women's Medical University-Waseda University Joint Institution for Advanced Biomedical Sciences on a project in liver cell sheet tissue engineering. Currently, I am a postdoc at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden examining the impact of biomaterials on body tissues.
If you have any questions about Baldwin, or even Duke in general feel free to email me (allie.speidel@gmail.com).