“I feel my work can have a much larger impact on health care, by providing knowledge or solutions that are available to everyone.”
Felipe Eltit
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Grad year: 2019
- Program:
- Campus: Vancouver
I started my PhD journey after several years of dental clinical practice and teaching at the university level. In my practice, the major clinical problems that I faced involved the interaction of the human body with biomaterials. My clinical background, combined with my master’s in cell biology, drove my interest in learning about materials and how they may affect human tissues. I joined the materials engineering department with my degree in biomedical engineering, in order to develop a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional project regarding the mechanisms of failure of metal hip implants. For this project, I explored the mechanisms of corrosion of metals in the human body and the effects of this process in cells, analyzed at the clinical, histological, immunological and molecular levels, and made important contributions to our knowledge of body and implant interactions.
I am highly motivated in contributing to community and societal development.
As an example, I developed an interchange program between the faculties of dentistry at UBC and Finis Terrae University, in Chile. As a result, 16 students visited UBC, a world class university, and 10 UBC students visited Chile, working in low-income communities providing dental attention. As president of the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Association and the BC chapter of the Canadian Biomaterials Society, I also developed seminars and talks to provide for both undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to interact with researchers, companies and entrepreneurs.
Outside of academia, for the past six years I have hosted the radio show ”Ecos de mi Pueblo” at Vancouver Cooperative radio (100.5 FM), providing information and education to the Latin American community of Vancouver. The show also focuses on supporting recent immigrants and temporary foreign workers by educating them on their rights while in Canada.
What has made your time at UBC the most memorable?
I lived most of my life in a very homogeneous country, where mostly everyone speaks the same language, has the same religion and eats the same food. At UBC I met a plethora of backgrounds in my colleagues, professors and friends that made me understand the world in a better way.
What has been your most memorable/valuable non-academic experience studying engineering at UBC?
The most important message that I learned at UBC is the respect and recognition of Indigenous peoples.
To see the president of the university doing a territorial acknowledgment at the beginning of a ceremony is an inspiration for the new generations. I know it means recognizing a shameful history, but the steps towards recognition and reparation are an example that I would love to see replicated in Latin America, where our natives are still ignored, and genocides that were carried out in the twentieth century are still denied by our governments.
Where do you find your inspiration?
In the generation of knowledge, I have always been inspired by the classic scientist and philosophers that developed the knowledge based on questions and observations of simple phenomena, changing paradigms.
Many of them were rejected by their societies, prosecuted or harassed, but made the most significant progress on human knowledge. Eratosthenes, by just observing shadows and counting steps, could determine precisely the diameter of the earth when everyone said it was flat. Twenty centuries later, Galileo could defy the dogmas by simply dropping rocks from a tower. By the observation of the sky he proposed that it was the earth that moves and not the sun and he risked his own life for doing so. Johannes Kepler generated a mathematical model to explain the universe, generating the laws that rules the movement of stars and planets, he was misunderstood.
Still today obtaining knowledge and communicating it is dangerous and is banned in many countries, but knowledge is what allows humans to progress.
With regards to communication of knowledge, my role models are Carl Sagan or Hernan Olguin. They made science available to everyone and inspired thousands of children to pursue a scientific career. Cosmos was an amazing book and TV show that explained science in the simplest language that a 10-year-old kid — as I was at the time — could understand. If I am a scientist now, it is partly thanks to these amazing communicators and scientists. The role of Carl Sagan making science available to everyone gave me the inspiration to communicate science, as I do in my radio show, and educate people by using available media.
