Staff Profile - Janet Jhoun


Staff Profile - Janet Jhoun
		One of the newest additions to our staff is Janet Jhoun, who joined our firm in April 1998. Janet holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. The terms ‘biomedical engineer,’ ‘bioengineer’ and ‘biomechanical engineer’ are sometimes interchanged because they all approach the study of medicine with the application of natural sciences and engineering principles. Janet first heard the term biomedical engineering in her junior year of high school when she began receiving information about colleges and universities. At the time, she wasn’t sure if she should pursue a scientific career or a medical one. Majoring in biomedical engineering offered Janet the opportunity to pursue both. “I decided to go to UCLA for my undergraduate studies. Life at UCLA was lots of fun. I learned
a great deal while I was there. In addition to a great academic education, I met good friends, volunteered in research, and determined that I wanted to go on to graduate school. I realized that there were too few great teachers out there. The great professors were enthusiastic about the class material and would bend over backwards to relay that enthusiasm to their students. My interests were heightened by courses in structural engineering and kinesiology. I discovered that the human body is just a very complex, dynamic structure that could be studied with engineering principles, but that there are lots of questions yet to be answered.” Janet attended graduate school at Northwestern University . “Being a graduate student gave me the opportunity to have closer interactions with researching professors. In addition to course work, I spent the majority of my time doing research. My main interest was in biomechanics. I worked at the Northwestern University Prosthetics Research Laboratory on gait mechanics, prosthesis-user interface mechanics, and mathematical modeling of these activities. The department of Biomedical Engineering was smaller than the other engineering disciplines at Northwestern, but it is one of the fastest growing fields in engineering.” Besides academic activities, Janet also pursued some hobbies. “Northwestern offered short-term extracurricular classes called mini-courses. I took a photography class and a couple of dance classes. I was such a shutterbug that I was deemed the ‘official photographer’ among my friends. I also learned how to play flag football and played in the intramural sports league for four years. In a way, I was actually applying my academic pursuits to improve my performance and reduce injury. I enjoyed the sport so much that I was actually the captain for one year!” “Joining Boster, Kobayashi and Associates was a great decision for me. I feel as though I’ve become a member of a family rather than a company, because everyone is concerned with my well-being and happiness. I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of the job very much. It is very rewarding to fit all the pieces together and to reconstruct how and why certain events most probably occurred. As with people, no two cases are the same. Each case fascinates me.”