I arrived in Baltimore, USA in the summer of 2018 with a backpack and a question something to do with what healthcare technology could become

I was there as a visiting, embedded in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, working in a group focused on bioinspired materials and 3D printing for biomedical applications. The campus in Baltimore is everything you imagine it to be: red brick and white columns, Gilman Hall rising above the quad with its clock tower.

Into the Cleanroom

I worked in a cleanroom lab. The first time I suited up in the full gown, hairnet, and gloves, I had to stop and laugh at myself a little. I was standing next to equipment worth more than most people's homes, about to do something that would have been science fiction to my undergraduate self two years earlier.

The work was technical, but what I was really doing was developing a deeper language for what "building something for healthcare" actually means.

The Lab Cohort

summer research cohort, Johns Hopkins University, 2018. I am somewhere in the back row & the one clearly delighted to be there.

We worked hard during the week, but the group also had a real warmth to it. There was a lab outing to a sprawling picnic and barbecue location on a blisteringly clear summer day.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of the great medical institutions in human history. It is where modern surgical sterile technique was codified, where cardiac surgery was pioneered, where the model of the teaching hospital was invented. There was particular kind of motivation among people here : Medicine has always been built by people who refused to accept the current answer as the final one

A Tour of the East Coast's Ideas

From the beginning, I wanted to use the proximity to understand what the broader ecosystem felt like and what researchers at America's great universities were thinking about when it came to 3D printing, healthcare, and medical devices. So on weekends and between commitments, I moved.

Philadelphia first. Temple University's College of Engineering was a stop I had arranged through a contact. I walked Penn's campus the same day. Boston was the longest trip. I had been wanting to see MIT since I was a teenager reading about it. I ended the Boston leg at Harvard. I sat on the steps of Widener Library in the late evening light.

The Roommates from ISI Kolkata

My apartment that summer housed three other interns: Ayush, Disha, and Sunrit, all from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, all doing statistics-related research somewhere in the Hopkins ecosystem.

One night we ended up in New York. Times Square at night, seen for the first time, is genuinely overwhelming.

What I Took Home

I came back to India with a clearer sense of what I was working toward. The summer had done something specific: it had shown me that the gap I sensed between how healthcare technology was conceived and how it was actually used in the clinic. I co-founded LUCID Implants, through hundreds of surgery observations, through conversations with surgeons across India. It eventually became the founding premise of Nuevata.

Written in 2026, looking back at photographs from the summer of 2018. Baltimore · Philadelphia · Cambridge · Boston · New York.