My name is Emily Eickhoff.

Holding a 3D printed version of my own heart!

I spent my childhood traipsing through the trails of a quaint college town in New Hampshire, a small state in the northeast of the USA. Spending time outdoors in nature continues to be an important part of my life.

My degree is in biomedical engineering and I work for Boston Children’s Hospital, where I build digital, patient-specific models of hearts for presurgical planning.

You’ll be seeing a lot of hearts from me over these next months; I continue to work for Boston Children’s Hospital while I’m taking Fab Academy.

Beyond hearts, my interests includ doing pretty much anything outdoors, cooking and consuming colorful foods with friends and loved ones, dancing wildly in the kitchen, and enjoying or making music. I love to use my hands and mind to make things.

My Motivation

To what have I dedicated myself to…

I am a proud member of a growing team of professional engineers uniquely positioned within Boston Children’s Heart Center. We support cardiac care providers and surgeons in developing and delivering the highest caliber of care to patients and their families.

We do this by:

Developing patient-specific, digital 3D models for enhanced visualization of complex congenital cardiac defects.
Continuing to uncover and investigate new questions, problems, or areas that would benefit from an engineering perspective
Developing a novel prospective planning workflow for complex chest reconstructions for patients with airway obstruction secondary to thoracic insufficiency
Modeling the effects of specific surgical approaches on the resulting blood flow dynamics in a patient’s body through virtual surgery combined with simulation and computational fluid modeling
Investigating cutting edge technologies and advancements in visualization including XR and 3D displays
Exploring ways to interact intuitively and/or sterilely with these 3D models to further enhance their value to patients & families and clinicians & surgeons alike
Collaborating with industry and academic partners
Applying a variety of software packages, simulation tools, and hardware to the clinical problem we are facing

We are solution-centric, resourceful, and scrappy; we use whatever combination of tools, packages, and techniques are necessary to tackle the clinical question.

Why Fab Academy?

I discovered the world of personal fabrication and maker spaces/fab labs about seven years ago when I was living and working in Boston, Massachusetts.

I originally enrolled in Fab Academy at Dassault Systemes’ state-of-the-art 3DExperience lab in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2018. I’ve included a few of my favorite projects from that time below. Ultimately, I opted to accept and start a new job rather than to finish Fab Academy that year, but I held onto the dream that one day I would retake Fab Academy and graduate. To take it here, in Barcelona, is quite literally a dream come true.

I’m taking Fab Academy to build my skills in rapid prototyping and to use my hands to make tangible, useful, and beautiful things. I’d also like to explore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Dovetailing with my job, I am dedicating my Fab Academy work to the heart, and specifically the realm of congenital heart defects.

My interest in the field of congenital heart defects is not random. But to understand who I am now, and what drives my motivation in this field, we need to go back further.