Aditi Singh says she was drawn to Boston University because of the opportunity it affords to meet people from diverse backgrounds.

STUDENT LIFE

Introducing BU’s Newest Terriers: Aditi Singh (ENG’28)

Family inspired her passion for biomedical engineering

This fall, 3,300 freshmen and 926 transfer students begin their careers at Boston University. At the 2024-2025 school year starts, we bring you some of their stories.

Family inspired Aditi Singh’s passion for biomedical engineering, starting with her grandfather. As a child, she couldn’t play with her prized remote-control car around him, because potentially its signal could interfere with his defibrillator.

“That was where my interest in medical technologies kind of came from,” says Singh (ENG’28).

Her younger brother presented a less serious, and more mundane, situation she had to negotiate. “He doesn’t have sleep apnea, but his snoring issues—I call them issues—they give me many problems, because we share a room,” she says. “I’m a pretty light sleeper.” She turned to Google, asking, “Why does my brother snore so much?” And what came up was articles about sleep apnea.

The next stop on her intellectual journey is Boston University, where she has joined the Class of 2028 to take advantage of BU’s formidable resources in biomedical engineering. 

Her research into sleep apnea revealed that the condition is more common than she thought, leading her to do a neuroscience fellowship at a sleep disorders lab at Albany Medical College while still in high school. “I analyzed data about potential therapeutics for obstructive sleep apnea,” she says. Her job was to analyze brain scans of mice to measure how long they spent in various stages of sleep. 

“We injected them with something that would help us see when a specific neurotransmitter was active in their brain,” Singh says. “We activated those neurotransmitters, and we saw how that affected the period of time they were spending in each different stage of sleep,” with the goal, she says, of learning whether activating certain neurotransmitters could be therapeutic.

She also did a virtual research fellowship with the University of Albany, learning computer languages “to analyze next-generation sequencing data” of mice to study salivary glands, she says. The goal was to see if salivary glands grown in vitro could treat conditions like dry mouth. “This was a bioinformatics kind of research project, and as I’m interested in biomedical engineering, I thought it would be cool to see how the programming aspect is used in biomedical research.”

Her father’s engineering career has made for a peripatetic life: born in India, Singh has lived in Singapore, Germany, and for the last decade, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Saratoga Springs is a great place, she says, but not particularly diverse, which made BU attractive to her for college, along with its engineering and computational reputation. “I was really excited to go somewhere that has a lot more of that diversity, so I can meet different types of people and just gain more perspectives.” (That Boston is a hub for her discipline helped, too.)

“Renaissance woman” doesn’t begin to capture her interests, which, beyond science, includes the presidency of her high school’s Key Club (linking students to volunteer opportunities), cofounder of the school’s chemistry club, and treasurer of the school newspaper. The latter testifies to her love of diversity, including in her life: “A lot of my writing was either about stuff that was going on in our school community, like potential course changes, or it was just fun stuff like a movie review or book review. It was a nice creative kind of side.”

“Aditi was truly a delight, soft-spoken, friendly, an excellent leader, and well-organized,” recalls Barbara Frasier, faculty advisor to the Key Club. She watched Singh grow into jobs as treasurer and then president of the club. “She worked well with me, as advisor,” Frasier says, “and with her fellow officers and club members to organize community service projects that would give back to our community and beyond.”

It’s easy to see why BU awarded Singh a Trustee Scholarship, given to about 20 Terriers annually who not only have standout academic records, but are also “creatively adventurous and demonstrate viewpoints, experiences, or achievements beyond the usual.”

What sustains her during days that shift into overdrive? “It’s super basic, but I like Taylor Swift,” she says. “Hindi music. I guess that’s also a way I like to connect back to my culture—like Bollywood songs.” And when feeling burned out, she’ll “just put on a playlist, get out some watercolors, paint a couple of flowers, and that usually gets me back on track.” She also makes jewelry and paper crafts.

She’s delighted to have drawn a double room with its own bathroom in Kilachand Hall this semester. As for having a roommate, she’s not worried about shut-eye—she has a researcher’s gusto for the unexplored. 

“After sleeping in the same room as my brother,” she says, “I’ll be fine. I’ll put on my noise-canceling headphones. I’ll make it work.”