Marvelous machine:
Engineering a labor of love for UA student

Taylor Verba, like all engineering students, studies machines.

Throughout her time at The University of Akron (UA), she has studied a particular machine and its parts – its “valves,” “ventricles” and “atrium” – to understand its proper function.

For she has seen what happens when it malfunctions, when those parts break down and need to be replaced.

“My grandma actually got a heart valve replacement,” she said. “And then my grandpa also had knee replacements … and I realized that I love people way too much to not be directly involved in this kind of work.”

Verba, a senior biomedical engineering major in the Williams Honors College (WHC), has been involved in that kind of work for the past five years: that is, studying the machinery of the body and learning to develop replacement parts, such as orthopedic implants.

In addition to working in the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory of UA’s Dr. Rouzbeh Amini, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, to understand “tricuspid valve leaflets” in pig hearts, Verba has completed four co-op rotations through the College of Engineering: two with ERT Imaging, a biotechnology company in Warrensville Heights, Ohio; and two with Zimmer Biomet, a worldwide leader in orthopedic device solutions in Warsaw, Ind.

In fact, after Verba graduates this spring, she will begin working full-time with Zimmer Biomet as a quality engineer, responsible for implementing procedures to ensure the safety and effectiveness of orthopedic devices.

The most difficult machine

“People like to say, ‘I get to work on cool machines,’ or ‘I get to build a bridge,’ but I get to work on the most difficult machine – which can even heal itself sometimes – and I get to build something that goes inside the body of a living person,” she says.

But Verba never would have had the opportunity to do so, she says, if it weren’t for the personal and academic growth she experienced in the WHC.  

She says that, as a child in her hometown of Parma, Ohio, she was such a “home body” that she “wouldn’t stay over at people’s houses.” Her mother worried that she wouldn’t be able to move away from home for her college experience.

But when Verba visited the Honors Complex, she found her “home away from home,” she says, and a kind of second family in its close-knit community of students, staff and faculty, and especially in the Honors Emerging Leaders Program (the honors division of UA’s Emerging Leaders, a Living-Learning Community dedicated to creating student leaders in the campus community).

“Emerging Leaders was a huge aspect for me coming here,” she says. “Having that ability to arrive on campus early, and quickly make friends my freshman year, to find students whose goals and personalities lined up with mine – it was a huge relief.”

Verba adds that Debbie Gannon, WHC program specialist, was her “Akron mother.”

“She just made my entire experience – she’s my mom here,” she says, laughing. “She was the one who pushed me to travel abroad, saying, ‘you gotta grow yourself as much as you can.’”

'An amazing opportunity' at Akron

“I tell students this is an amazing opportunity, take advantage of it while you are in college,” Gannon says. “You will get to travel to another country, learn their culture, perhaps take classes, community service, and even think about, after graduation, looking at possible employment.”

In one of her Honors Colloquium courses, “The Global Lawyer,” Verba and other Williams Honors Scholars traveled to Japan with Matthew Wilson, UA professor of law (and former UA president), and Sarah Cravens, C. Blake McDowell Jr. Professor of Law (and former interim dean of the WHC), to study international law.

She also traveled on a service and learning trip to Haiti, through the College of Business Administration’s Institute for Leadership Advancement, and then to New Zealand.

“Being in cultures that were completely different from my own put me way out of my comfort zone, and being able to overcome those obstacles was huge for me,” Verba says. “Taking those trips led me to be able to take a job at Zimmer Biomet, four and a half hours away from home.”

Work transcends grades

She says that Zimmer Biomet is the perfect place for her to “make a difference” in the lives of others.

“I’ve always wanted to help people,” says Verba, who, after her best friend was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, joined UA’s student organization Akron for Cancer, part of the nationwide organization Colleges Against Cancer, dedicated to raising funds for cancer research through events such as Relay for Life.

“When she was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, that’s when it hit me: this is not about grades anymore, this is real, and she’s going through something I can’t even imagine,” Verba says.

In witnessing the strength of her friend – who continued to attend classes while receiving chemotherapy, and whose cancer is now in remission – Verba was reminded not only that her work transcends grades, but that there is much more to that peculiar machine, the heart, than the sum of its parts.

She was reminded, moreover, that her vocation is not merely to fix machines – to tinker with tissue and bend bones of metal – but to mend the broken heart, to improve the lives of those who, like her grandparents and best friend, are in need of someone who “loves people way too much” to see them suffer.

“I have been blessed with a hardworking attitude, a drive for learning, and the ability to be curious,” Verba says. “So why not use those gifts to increase the quality of life of those around me?”