At first, the two research novices diligently followed the advice of their older colleagues.

But then Josiah Saddick and Zakir Jiwani, frustrated by their stalled progress on a bone scaffolding experiment in a biomedical lab halfway around the world, began to wonder — would they get further if they did the complete opposite of what they’d been told?

It was a half joke. But then they did it. They doubled the concentration. Changed the temperature. Stopped asking for permission. And finally, something clicked.

_Zakir Jiwani and Josiah Saddick

“We decided to go off-book completely, just to see what would happen, and it ended up working out in our favor,” Saddick says. “Based on other research, we shouldn’t have been successful, but that was actually what was holding us back.”

Their impulse paid off with a stable, therapeutic mixture for a 3D-printable bone scaffold implant — a feat not even the PhD students in their lab had achieved.

That success capped a whirlwind summer for the two Drexel engineering majors, who had gone from rising second years fresh off their first year of college to co-investigators in an international lab — working shoulder-to-shoulder with PhD researchers at India’s top university, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) in Chennai.

The 10-week immersion in research, collaboration and culture was made possible by a renewal of Drexel’s STAR Scholars program and its international research version, iSTAR.

From Classroom to Chennai

Each summer, Drexel’s STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) Scholars program places first-year students in experiences that have them tackling serious research alongside faculty mentors. iSTAR takes the program global, matching undergraduates with challenging projects at institutions abroad, studying breast cancer, artificial intelligence and more.

In 2024, iSTAR relaunched after a pandemic pause, and thanks to personal and institutional ties between Drexel and the IITM, the program picked up nearly where it left off.

Pennoni Honors College’s Undergraduate Research and Enrichment Programs (UREP), which runs STAR Scholars, placed the pair of aspiring engineers in IITM’s Department of Applied Mechanics & Biomedical Engineering in Assistant Professor Swathi Sudhakar’s Nano-Molecular Lab. Saddick is a mechanical engineering major and Jiwani studies computer engineering, so biomedical engineering was a new area for them.

Their assignment: Develop a biocompatible material for a 3D-printed bone scaffold structure that can support new bone growth — a promising alternative to surgical implants for patients suffering from large bone defects, osteosarcoma or osteoporosis, which make it hard for the body to grow new bone tissue.

They arrived in Chennai just weeks after wrapping up their first year at Drexel, stepping off the plane and smack into a wall of humidity. After a nearly sleepless first 48 hours and a close call with a currency rip-off, the reality of life as advanced researchers set in as quickly as the sticky air.

FREE RANGE CAMPUS_Chital deer and monkeys are a common sight on IITM’s campus, which is adjacent to a free-range nature preserve.

“We originally thought we were going to hop on a project they already had, but they gave us a project to start up and continue with,” Saddick says. “It essentially opened us up to the global scientific community as we got insight into the world of a PhD student. We went from normal classes to PhD-level research.”

For Jiwani, 19, it was a continuation of an already global education. Born in South Africa, raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and educated in Kenya, he had traveled to India before, though not to Chennai. But it was 19-year-old Saddick’s first time flying.

“As an engineer, I was just amazed, just looking at the wings. I’ve studied aerodynamics and it was pretty exciting to experience it for once,” says Saddick, a first-generation Guyanese American student who grew up in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. “But I had to learn how to get comfortable on a plane.”

They knew to expect long hours, intense lab work and cultural adjustments. Less expected were the gazelles, monkeys and deer on campus. The University, situated next to the free-range Guindy National Park in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, occupies a sprawling campus full of trees and wandering wildlife, including Blackbuck antelope with tall, spiraling horns. You have to be alert, says Jiwani.

“We would just be going to the labs, or for food, and then there would just be monkeys in the trees,” Jiwani says. “One day Josiah was carrying snacks across campus and was surrounded by monkeys.”

Mentorship, Multiplied

Though iSTAR began in 2012 and had seen several students off to countries in Europe, the program may never have reached India had it not been for Sriram Balasubramanian, associate professor in Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

One of just a few faculty members who hosts high school students in his lab, Balasubramanian began recruiting Drexel undergraduates in his lab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia even before he joined the University in 2010. He’s mentored dozens of STAR Scholars over the years, helping them connect to conferences and opportunities with hospitals, universities and companies.

Chennai is his hometown, and when they arrived, he served as guide to the bubbling tech hub of 10 million, India’s fourth-largest city. He helped them get furniture for their rooms, securing better prices on mattresses than a tourist could ever hope, showing them the best places to eat, and steering them through the unspoken expectations of lab life at India’s top-ranked university.

“They’re expecting you to get the work done, even if they aren’t checking on you,” he says. “India is also a completely different country and culture. Every state speaks a different language, so I’m able to help them communicate. It’s almost critical to have a faculty member be there as a guardian or caretaker no matter the country.”

To be mentored by Balasubramanian means learning how to become a mentor, too — he hosts tiers of students of different ages, believing that when one is both mentoring and being mentored, you gain a new appreciation for what it takes.

“It essentially opened us up to the global scientific community. We went from normal classes to PhD-level research.”

“High school students are getting mentored by the STAR Scholars, who are getting mentored by master’s students and PhD students,” he explains. “Within the lab, they learn with each other and can look at students senior to them and see what they could be doing in a couple years.”

By week two, Saddick and Jiwani were fully immersed, logging 40-hour workweeks, traversing the massive campus on rented bikes like locals, and bonding with their PhD lab mates over tea breaks, frequent breaks for sweets and beach excursions along India’s Bay of Bengal. The research community at the IITM — rigorous but generous with their help — welcomed them in.

“They have some amusement park rides…it was like your typical boardwalk experience, but the rides had no seatbelts,” Saddick recalls. “There was a bar, but you could feel yourself in free fall for a few moments. Zakir [Jiwani] and I were kind of freaking out, which they found hilarious, but it was a bonding moment.”

Trial, Trial and Trial Again

By week eight or nine, the undergrads were racing to make headway before their time in India ran out.

Their assignment was going slower than they expected.

Bone scaffolds help damaged bones regrow without the need for painful bone grafts from elsewhere in the body, saving patients from complex, expensive surgeries and the risk of fatal infections. Their challenge was to concoct a mixture for the scaffolds that was strong enough to extrude while also being biocompatible.

“When we mixed the solutions, we were looking for a Jello-like consistency that solidified almost like hair gel,” Saddick says. “The first solutions would somewhat reach that consistency, but they had very low viscosity… when we freeze-dried them, they wouldn’t be strong enough to undergo the testing.”

Their supervisors had given them a base mixture to work with made of natural proteins from corn and crustaceans, and they were tasked with adding in curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, as a biodrug additive to help reduce inflammation and prevent infection.

The catch? Curcumin metabolizes too quickly in the body to be useful as a therapy. Their supervisors had a theory that binding it with zinc would stabilize it enough to make it useable in the scaffold.

The process took several days, from mixing the gel to putting it through two freezing processes at 0°C and then at -80°C. If the scaffold broke apart, they’d start again. The failures stacked up.

“It was very discouraging at first to go on for like three weeks on an experiment and get no results,” Jiwani recalls. “STAR is designed as an entry way into research, but what most people don’t realize is that they’re trying to do the work that takes a PhD student one year, and they’re trying to fit that into three months.”

_1 To create the bone scaffold material, student researchers mixed proteins from corn and crustaceans, plus curcumin they stabilized with zinc.
_2 The yellow tint of the scaffold is derived from curcumin, a derivative of turmeric that the researchers believe will improve bone healing.
_3 After many failed experiments, Saddick and Jiwani landed on a combination of ingredients stable enough to be used to 3D print a square-inch cube scaffold.
_4 Close-up of the scaffold.

Courtesy of Saddick and Jiwani

Still, they kept iterating. They went back to the books, talked to their colleagues who would quiz them on their knowledge, and as their confidence grew in the lab, they became bolder in trying unconventional approaches.

“We had five or six trials, and if we didn’t have that support, we probably wouldn’t have succeeded on the last one,” says Saddick.

One day, after weeks with no solid results but reluctant to ask for an extension, Saddick and Jiwani made a pact: they wouldn’t leave the lab until something worked.

The hours slipped by as they ran trial after trial, late into the night, until they were the only ones still there. Around 4 a.m., they finished one last batch. It gelled — a good sign — but the real test would come the next day, after freeze-drying.

“We put so much time into it,” Saddick says. “We were just so excited. We finally had success, and we had to make the most of this time we had left.”

Twelve hours later, their breakthrough held. The scaffold was stable, printable — a first for their lab. “We tried the 3D printing aspect right afterward and it worked perfectly,” says Saddick.

Their scaffold project became the basis for a new phase of research after the pair returned to the United States, with their Indian PhD colleagues taking up animal testing — and now asking them for pointers.

“Everyone was like, ‘You should show us,’” Saddick says. “And we felt equal at that point.”

“Being in this academic environment with people who are really, really good at what they do was eye-opening…
You’re always at the cutting edge of that field.”

That collaboration — students learning from PhDs, then teaching in return — is exactly the kind of mentorship Balasubramanian and the STAR program fosters. iSTAR and STAR Scholars often continue working with their mentors as co-ops or for academic credit, or present to colleagues or at research conferences while still undergraduates.

“STAR Scholars are just exceptional,” Balasubramanian reflects. “They finished high school the year before, and they’re almost like grad students already. Their participation in the lab helps their position for future careers and also creates a nice group to work with.”

Since returning, the pair have also continued to do some computational work that they started in India, developing generative AI tools to help identify which implants should be used in specific cases. “It would help alleviate the strain that’s placed on Indian rural healthcare… to cut down a diagnosis that takes up to three days to about 20 minutes,” Jiwani says.

While Jiwani and Saddick were celebrating their research breakthrough, the success of their summer in Chennai reflected a much larger achievement — the deepening of a strategic partnership with India.

A Passport to Partnerships

For Jaya Mohan, who directs UREP, iSTAR offers a model of global engagement that’s both meaningful and scalable — and that aligns with Drexel’s broader international and educational goals.

“Ultimately, my goal is to have iSTAR be tied really closely to the University’s goals for global engagement,” says Mohan, who has seen students return from STAR experiences more connected and able to contribute to research at a high level. “It’s an easy stepping stone into having additional conversations about what else a partnership between Drexel and this institution looks like.”

India is central to those ambitions.

The country is currently the top sender of international students to the United States, particularly at the graduate level, and it’s investing heavily in science and technology — Drexel’s own areas of strength.

IIT Madras is Drexel’s primary partner in the country — not just through iSTAR, but through guest lectures and research collaborations. The universities are working on new joint master’s degree programs in biomedical engineering and materials science that could launch as early as fall 2026, with students spending time at both institutions.

Similar collaborative graduate programs already exist between other Drexel colleges and various Indian universities, including the Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar School of Advanced Career Education, Chennai; SRM Institute of Science & Technology, Chennai; Maharashtra Institute of Technology-Art, Design & Technology University, Pune. The goal is for students to get a cultural as well as a scientific education to prepare them for the interconnected world.

“Cutting-edge scientific research is done increasingly through international collaborations, rarely in isolation within one country,” says Vice Provost for Global Engagement Rogelio Miñana, who has been helping to deepen Drexel’s global connections. “Considering that most leading companies in health, science and technology are multinational, having this type of global experience gives students a clear edge in the job market.”

CROSS CULTURAL COLLABO_Jiwani (second from left) poses with some lab mates during the summer-long research project in Chennai.

At the IITM, researchers are designing technologies for delivery across India — including in rural regions where access to care and infrastructure can be limited. That mindset resonates deeply with Drexel’s ethos of applied, human-centered science.

“This idea of doing science for the greater good in a way that is affordable and easily disseminated teaches students not only about scientific research, but about the human values and the higher purpose behind the science,” Miñana says.

And, it’s powerful cultural exchange. Drexel students aren’t just gaining lab experience — they’re immersed in new ways of thinking, working and collaborating. They return more confident, more curious and more capable of producing useful science.

It’s set the stage for a transformation in Jiwani. Being immersed in a top-tier research university changed him, says Jiwani. After returning to Philadelphia, he was inspired to explore opportunities in Drexel’s nanomaterials lab and more research-heavy paths.

“I was able to develop not only academically but also as a person, in terms of integrity and my interpersonal skills,” he says. “Being in this academic environment with people who are really, really good at what they do was eye-opening… You’re always at the cutting edge of that field.”