Tiffany Toh '25: At the heart of innovation
Graduating senior Tiffany Toh double-majored in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering, has developed a working medical device prototype for cardiac patients, is an avid ballroom dancer, and served as vice president of the Engineering Honor Society, Tau Beta Pi. Suffice to say, she’s made the most of her time at Yale. And that was after she winnowed down her activities to those that mattered the most to her.
“I asked myself, ‘What do I love, and what do I need for my future?’ And that was both electrical engineering and biomedical engineering. And outside of academics, that was mostly ballroom, because ballroom for me is a place to express things that can't be expressed in formulas.”
After the summer, which may include a ballroom dancing stint in Italy, she begins her PhD work in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
What brought you to Yale four years ago?
Yale was my first choice college, and I was really excited about all that I had heard about the community, the collaborative environment, and the opportunities for me to forge my own way. I was excited to take on new challenges in a new place. When I finally got here, I was very impressed by just how true those marketing bullet points were. I found a really great, welcoming community. I found people very, very excited to collaborate and start new projects. I have to admit that the things I have been most grateful for during my time at Yale were the same things I was most drawn to four years ago.
You got a jump on your Electrical Engineering thesis, starting work on developing a new medical device for the heart.
What I’m working on is basically a new topology for a wireless, battery-less pacemaker. Traditionally, you have a big battery pack that's implanted in the body, and two internal wires that connect it to the heart tissue. But now that we have such advanced wireless power transfer, what if we took the battery pack out and we implemented it as some sort of external device and communicated with the heart using just magnetic inductive coupling? The most novel part of this project is that you can communicate with multiple different coils in different locations inside of the heart using only one external transmitter driven at different frequencies. This borrows advancements in the electrical engineering field that were made for applications like drone networks and IoT, but combines it with recent progress in pacemaker design.
We have now fully verified the electrical feasibility of the prototype, and for my Biomedical Engineering thesis I got the chance to test it on real human tissue, in petri dishes. It was a crazy feeling to have, to see muscles — human heart muscles — contract when I press a button.
What advice would you give to incoming freshman?
Just like many other upperclassmen, I’d say: Don't overcommit to a million and one extracurriculars. But I think that no matter how many times you receive this advice, you're still going to do that—you have to learn that yourself. So my real advice is to embrace the personal growth that comes along with making these mistakes, with over-committing and then scaling down, with taking too many classes and having to drop one, with taking classes you don't like, with changing your major. Yale is where you're going to make, in my opinion, the most personal growth in any four years of maybe your entire life, just because there are so many things going on and so many opportunities to go take your life in different directions. So be really comfortable with seeing yourself change over the next four years.
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Published Date
May 14, 2025
