Owen Douglas Pearl, PhD
UKRAINE
I am partnering with colleagues at Temple University and Ukraine's National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institite" to help jump start the Ukrainian Assistive & Biomedical Engineering (UABME) Hub by transferring domain knowledge in biomedical engineering, biorobotics, biomechanics, portable sensing, prosthetics and rehabilitative interventions.
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The need for affordable, yet robust sensing methods and intervention strategies is of growing relevance in Ukraine due to large numbers of civilian casualties resulting from the invasion of their home.
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China
I've been studying Mandarin Chinese independently since 2015 and have since passed the HSK 4 certification and traveled to China twice.
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The first time, I lived in Xiamen (Fujian Province) for two months and worked as an undergraduate research fellow in Xiamen University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.
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The second time, I participated in a two week long cultural immersion program with Zhejiang Normal University in Jinhua (Zhejiang Province).
Korea
After my fellowship at Xiamen University ended, I continue my collaboration and submitted a research abstract to the world's largest interdisciplinary conference on the topic of Raman spectroscopy. I was later granted the privilege of giving an oral presentation at the 26th International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy.
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As an undergraduate student, I traveled abroad once again to attend my very first conference in Jeju, Korea. It was a blast!
Japan
My wife and I are volunteers of the Evangelical Free Church of America's (EFCA) planning team for the Apex Experience (AE). The AE is a culturally immersive walkthrough experience, which takes place at the EFCA's national youth conference - Challenge, where 5,000 US students are introduced to the spiritual and societal needs of a foreign country as a means of revealing to them their own spiritual needs.
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This time, the focus was on Japan - specifically Tokyo - so my wife and I were sent across the world to represent the planning team and help lead discussion with Japanese Christians and missionaries across denominations.
Europe
Juli and I lived in the Netherlands for a few months and got to travel around Europe in our free time!
However, to Juli's vexation, we kept accidentally running into stuff that made me geek out, like original copies of Mécanique analytique by Lagrange and Traité de dynamique by D’Alembert, the tablet marking where Paul gave is Aeropagus sermon, and a favorite painting of mine by Théodore Géricault that exemplifies a common misconception of the biomechanics of horses prior to the late 1800s.