Alexander Ulate wins Three Minute Thesis competition at 2025 SHPE national convention

Doctoral student Alexander Ulate won the Three Minute Thesis competition hosted by the 2025 SHPE national convention which concluded last month in Philadelphia. Winning the Early Stage category of the event, Ulate’s presentation was titled, “Race to freeze time: accelerating cryopreservation using radio frequency sensors.”

Working under the supervision of Rhonda Franklin (McKnight Presidential Endowed Professor), Ulate’s research is in the area of radio frequency (RF) and microwave electronics, specifically designing a digital material sensor that can test for material properties using RF. He has situated his work in the cryobiology space, where it will be particularly useful for the development of cryoprotective chemicals. These are agents that can preserve tissues and organs at extremely low temperatures for months instead of a few hours. Extending the preservation time means the current transplant window of four to six hours can be expanded which can positively impact transplant waiting lists (according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, there are more than 100,000 people on transplant lists currently, and each day 13 people on the list die waiting for a transplant). Presently, the development of such agents, which involves testing for aspects such as toxicity and effectiveness in tissue preservation, is a complex and time consuming affair involving biological systems, and the tests themselves can take more than three days. Ulate’s goal is to develop a non-invasive system that can accelerate the testing process. His work aims to create a novel RF sensor that sends electrical signals into the chemicals and observe their response in the electrical space. The goal is to gather the information to compare different chemicals and their performance to speed up the testing process. 

Ulate works closely with scientists in the NSF supported partnership Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio) that is led by the University of Minnesota and Massachusetts General Hospital. He has been able to test his sensor on chemicals made by Mass General and assign each chemical its own fingerprint. This has allowed scientists to decide on what chemicals they would like to continue testing further, a decision that they can now make in a matter of minutes rather than days. Ulate hopes to expand his work further to develop a platform that can test multiple chemicals at once and reduce the number of pre-tests. 

The goal of ATP-Bio is to “extend the ability to bank and transport cells, aquatic embryos, tissue, skin, whole organs, microphysiological systems (“organs-on-a-chip”), and even whole organisms through a team approach to build advanced biopreservation technologies.” Learn more about ATP-Bio.

The SHPE Three Minute Thesis competition has two categories: early stage (meant for master’s and Ph.D. students) and late stage (meant for Ph.D. candidates and post-doctoral associates).