Where are they now? - Niwot High alum Justin Rolando

Graduating from Niwot High School in 2005 was only the start of Justin Rolando's educational journey.

Four years at the University of Colorado Boulder and eight years at Caltech where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree, Rolando is now living in Boston working on the forefront of medical technology. His work is primarily focused on integrating engineering into the field of medicine for practical use.

"We're trying to translate engineering and scientific ideas from..., we always call it from the bench to the bedside," Rolando said. "It's bringing things out of the engineering department and into the hospitals where they can have a clinical impact and be useful to patients."

Rolando is currently in his third year as a research fellow at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. He's also a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

His work includes early detection of breast cancer through a blood test, non-invasive detection of sepsis in infants and at-home tests for both Lyme disease and Candida auris, an endemic fungal infection.

Still, Rolando remains humble and acknowledges that there's still plenty of work to be done in the field of medical technology.

"I'm still learning," Rolando said. "It's a journey and I think at this point in my career, it would be revisionist if I said I had done anything that was really meaningful yet. Give me a couple of months or a year or something and I'll tell you if this breast cancer blood test works. That would be huge if we can get any of those things and early tests for sepsis in infants. I focus a lot on diseases where there are vulnerable populations and the diseases themselves have a lot of different characteristics."

Rolando hopes that the field of medicine can continue to better understand how specific diseases can differ case-by-case. The characteristics of cancer, for example, vary drastically based on its location and the person affected.

"It's important that we start to unravel differences and uniqueness in the cancers," Rolando said. "I think a lot about working toward precision medicine because even within a breast cancer, depending on that person's history, where they've come from and things like even what their grandparents did, influence the course of that disease and how it manifests. How do we find the right treatment for the right person at the right time?"

Rolando added that he still makes it back to Niwot a few times a year, often to ski with his father, John Rolando, a former triathlete.