User:Snd5

About Me

Hi! My name is Shreyas Dahotre, and I am a freshman here at Duke. I am in the Pratt School of Engineering, and I plan on majoring in Biomedical Engineering with a possible minor in Economics. I am originally from Knoxville, TN.

Some of my favorite activities are playing/watching sports, especially college football and basketball, playing video games, and listening to music.

Name Pronunciation

So my name isn't that hard to pronounce - it just looks kinda weird. Basically, for my first name: SHRAY-us. First syllable rhymes with "hay", "bay", "weigh", etc. And then -us. Some people say Shuh-RAY-us or Sher-AY-us, making it three syllables. But any way you pronounce it, if you say it fast, it all sounds the same. For my last name, it's pronounced: Duh-HO-tray. So not too bad.

It is not pronounced: SHREE-us Duh-HO-tree or SHREE-us Duh-HO-ter or anything like that.

Grand Challenges for Engineering

The Grand Challenges for Engineering are considered to be the next set of core objectives for engineers worldwide. These goals are meant to help improve the lives of future generations, much like the availability of electricity, airplanes, and computers have revolutionized the world today.

As a future biomedical engineer, one the Grand Challenges that is particularly interesting to me is the challenge of engineering better medicines. One specific problem with today's medicines is that many disease-causing pathogens are developing immunity to drugs that are currently available. Thus, it is very important in the near future, to find new disease-fighting agents. One interesting method that I read about is modifying bacteriophages to attack specific bacteria. The bacteriophages work with existing antibiotics to prevent a bacteria's DNA from repairing itself and developing immunity.

Here is the link:

Engineered viruses can help fight antibiotic resistance, MIT news, created 2 March 2009, accessed 23 September 2010 (Engineer Better Medicine)

MATLAB Help

My favorite demo was the one for the game of life. Probably the first reason is because I had to program it in high school (in Visual Basic, I think), so it was cool to see it in MATLAB. The second reason is because I like seeing all the funky shapes it makes and seeing how long it lasts before things just start spinning in circles.