The Charlatan’s Hilary Roberts spoke with Winnie Ye, a Carleton professor who received a $112,475 grant from the Ontario government in July, about her research using light as a tool for diagnosing diseases more efficiently.

The Charlatan (TC): Where do you get your ideas for your research from?

Winnie Ye (WY): I’ve been in this field for 11 years. So I guess I’m just interested in doing something that can really impact real world problems. I’m very interested in doing biophotonics because I think it would really impact problems like health problems.
[Where do] the ideas come from? I guess it’s because I’m an engineer. I make devices and I think my devices can have a lot of applications.

TC: How are you trying to help change the ways we diagnose diseases?

WY: I think most sensors that are in commercial use or in hospitals are mostly chemical-based, so you need to have certain chemicals. So it’s like you’d do your blood test and you’d run through all these chemical things and you’d see that “oh, you have this thing or not.”

It’s very efficient, obviously, because a lot of people are using it. It’s very stable. But what happens is that you need a large quantity of it. So you know when you go to get your blood work, they take, you know, these eight vials of blood. The lab takes your blood and they will run a lot of tests. It takes a long time.

So for what I do, because I make optical devices, we use optics, which is just light, to see things. You don’t even need to draw blood. You can just go through the test medium and you can actually get useful information.

I think a lot of [people] may have heard of oximeters that you put on your thumb and you can test the oxygen level in your blood so that you don’t really need to draw blood.

You apply a special light source that goes through, say, the two [sides] of your thumb so the light penetrates from one end of your thumb through the other end.

The transmitted light will be different depending on how much oxygen you have in your blood. That information can tell you right away, OK, you have very low oxygen levels. So things like that would be very useful in providing a timely diagnosis of certain diseases.

We’re trying [to] making things more convenient for the patient. I develop sensors to do that. Not like what you see already here, but something even more advanced. For example, how to cure depression by injecting photons into it. But we’re still in the developing stage and we’re still trying to understand the chemistry of how human cells work, which is not my strength yet. I’m teaming up with people who specialize in the biology aspect of human cells and so on.

TC: Why do you feel that the work you do is really important and really useful for us?

WY: It is very useful because, and I’m biased obviously, I think optics is the future of technology. It has a lot of advantages over electronics.
Photonics itself is new to start with and to combine biology or chemistry into this and to apply it to the health-care problems, I think that’s even newer and there are not a lot of people who are bridging between the two worlds.
I’m sure what we have in photonics, just for the technology side, would have so much to offer the bio world. It’s just that we don’t have enough information from our side to apply our knowledge. The same thing applies to the bio world.
I think understanding a little bit of each world would help us to really make something very revolutionary. I’m optimistic about what I do.

TC: For students who are interested in becoming researchers, maybe in your field or even in general, do you have any advice for them?

WY: Absolutely. I have four undergraduate students this summer who work with me. Two of them are second-year students and two of them are third-year students, which I am absolutely amazed about because I had no clue about research before I [entered] fourth year.
They didn’t know what they’d like, so I said, you can do solar cells because I make solar cells. So they are doing a solar cell project and at the same time they are helping me to build the testing stage for my sensors.
And also, at the same time, they are building a simulator for the sun because I am teaching a course on solar cells. They started the summer with me and I hope by the end of the summer, they’ll find something interesting about what I do that they’ll continue to do.
Sometimes, the prof has money to pay and sometimes they don’t. For my students, I do pay them, except one student. So they should apply for [the federal government’s Undergraduate Student Research Awards Program, or USRA] if they have a really good GPA. If not, they can apply certainly for research grants through Carleton.

TC: Getting the opportunity to do that research sounds so exciting.

WY: Also, the government supports that, so if [students] have good GPAs, should apply for USRA. Not everyone knows about them because the deadline is in early September, so by the time students knew about it, the deadline had passed.
But for this summer, three of my students are USRA students. It’s a great program. They pay [$4,500] for the summer and the prof is forced to pay additional top-ups, so they make decent money for undergraduate students.
They do research and they can say, “No, that field is really not for me.” OK, fine, then you can find something that you like. But it’s better than, “Oh, I have no idea what research is.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.