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The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in March, 1997.
Joseph Tranquillo '97
Making his mark with an eye on the future
As a high school student, Joseph Tranquillo '97 would not have guessed he would one day be chatting as a college undergraduate with the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick, one of the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA. Nor could he have imagined that he would present a paper in the Netherlands at the biomedical field's most prestigious conference. And he never would have predicted he would receive a NASA grant to invent a device designed to help increase the mobility and ensure the safety of astronauts."I never expected to be where I am today," said Tranquillo, an engineering major with a double concentration in biomedical and electrical engineering. "If I think back to where I was intellectually in high school and weigh it against where I am now, there is just no comparison."
Tranquillo's meeting and conversation with the renowned scientist Crick, which occurred in 1996 after The Trinity Pipes sang at a reception held at the University of California, is one of many memorable moments he has experienced while at Trinity. Tranquillo has accumulated those memories while excelling in the engineering program. Consistently named to the faculty honors list, he is a United Technologies Connecticut Scholar and Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship nominee. This year he was named a President's Fellow for his outstanding achievements in engineering.
Music and service
Tranquillo's musical achievements rival his academic accomplishments and extend far beyond his singing with The Pipes. He co-founded the Trinity Pep Band and the Pastoral Musicians, and he plays the trumpet in the Jazz Band. He is also active on the stage. "Trinity has taught me a lot more than just how to be a good engineer," Tranquillo noted.
He has not allowed his busy academic and extracurricular schedule to preclude active involvement in the community. Since his freshman year, he has been active in the College's student-run Catholic organization, the Newman Club, and has volunteered with its members at local homeless shelters.
When he enrolled at Trinity Tranquillo followed in the footsteps of his father, Anthony Tranquillo '72, also an engineering major. "When I was growing up, if I asked a question about science, my father was usually the one who answered it. And it usually was a pretty good answer," Tranquillo said.
Making his mark internationally
Tranquillo has gone on to find his own answers to scientific questions and, in the process, has made his mark outside the College. In February of 1996 he wrote a research paper and participated in a regional biomedical engineering conference at Rutgers University with Associate Professor of Engineering Taikang Ning. Based on his success there, Tranquillo then collaborated with two of his professors and coauthored two research papers on electroencephalograms (EEGs). Last November, he attended a biomedical engineering conference in Amsterdam, sponsored by the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers and the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and presented their papers.
The papers, "Quadratic Phase Coupling of the Maturing Hippocampal EEG" and "The Correlation Dimension in CA1: A Promising Measure of Thetarhythm Maturation," were the only papers presented by an undergraduate in the general session. "It was a little nerve-wracking at first," Tranquillo said, recalling how he felt reading at the conference. "I was worried that people weren't going to take me seriously. I don't even have my B.S. degree yet. But because of that, they took me even more seriously," Tranquillo said of the reaction to his participation in the conference. Through their research, Tranquillo and his professors are trying to find ways for a computer to read EEGs, which could be useful in diagnosing conditions such as epilepsy and disorders of the brain more quickly.
Professor Ning believes what distinguishes Tranquillo is "a very, very good work ethic. He works on a project day and night. He shows that at Trinity, you can get a good education and, at the same time, do good research."
Last year, at the suggestion of Professor Ning, Tranquillo applied for and won a NASA Undergraduate Fellowship of $2,000 to research and design a portable heart monitor that could one day be used to evaluate the well-being of astronauts when they are outside their spacecraft. Currently, such monitoring must be performed inside the spacecraft, Tranquillo explained. The project has become his senior thesis.
Life after Trinity
While busy at work on his senior thesis, Tranquillo is looking foward to his life after graduation, when he plans to pursue his interest in electrophysiology in graduate school in hopes of either teaching or pursuing a career in research. He has narrowed his choices to Johns Hopkins University and Duke University, both highly respected for their biomedical engineering programs.
Though he is looking forward to graduate school, he will always remember the role Trinity played in his life. "When I came here I thought I'd be going to my classes, learning theory and how to solve equations," he recalled. "When I started my EEG work and began to apply what I had learned in the classroom, I realized that I never really knew how much I knew!"
--Michael Bradley '98