“If you accumulate that delay over the winter you become out of sync, like jet lag basically,” says Dr Mariana Figueiro, of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in New York. “So it’s very important to get that signal in the morning to reset your biological clock.”

"I entered college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a computer science major but decided on mechanical engineering since I liked to work with my hands. I had two internships that helped shape my career. The first was with Benét Laboratories, a research and development company known for manufacturing cannons and mortars, located in Watervliet, New York. The most memorable projects I worked on involved testing the safety and efficacy of the cannons the company manufactured."

An artificial pancreas, the ultimate cure for type 1 diabetes, will be tested in clinical trials as a result of a $1 million National Institutes of Health Grant awarded to Dr. B. Wayne Bequette of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to fund research concerning his closed-loop artificial pancreas developed along with colleagues at Stanford University, the University of Colorado, and the University of Virginia. Frequent insulin injections and blood samples may be a thing of the past for recipients of the device.