Sara Pollard

I am a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, where I develop soft, wearable, silk-based biosensors and mobile machine learning tools for continuous health monitoring outside the clinic. My work brings together biomaterials, wearable sensing, and privacy-aware computational analysis to convert subtle biochemical signals into measurements that are robust, interpretable, and useful in real-world settings. In Tufts' Silklab, I design passive sensing platforms for applications ranging from dopamine detection in sweat to liner-integrated sensors for women's health, with the aim of making sophisticated physiological monitoring more accessible and deployable.

My commitment to this work is shaped by both how I grew up and why I chose engineering in the first place. On my family's cattle farm in Maryland, I learned to improvise, troubleshoot, and build with limited resources. Later, as my mother survived bouts of osteosarcoma and underwent limb-salvage surgery with a prosthetic humerus, I saw what engineering can mean at the human level. It can restore function, preserve independence, and change the course of a life. That perspective still guides my research today: the most meaningful technologies are not only innovative, but practical, equitable, and built for the realities of the people who use them.