The Girl Who Zoomed In

When Lillian Hutchinson was 8 years old, she talked her mother into giving up a drop of blood from a diabetes lancet so she could study it under a microscope.  

By her freshman year at Little Rock Central High School, a classroom exercise with pond water stopped her cold. She was supposed to take notes. Instead, she couldn't stop following the creatures around the droplet.   

Once home, she ran to a nearby pond to scoop up the "dirtiest water" she could find, just to keep looking. 

"There are lots of little things controlling everyday life for us that aren't visible to the naked eye," Hutchinson said. "This is happening in front of me all the time, everywhere, and I only know it because I zoomed in." 

That instinct to zoom in has carried Hutchinson, now a senior chemical engineering major in the Honors College at the U of A, from a childhood fascination to the leading edge of regenerative medicine and a NASA collaboration focused on living on Mars.  

She is part of a senior design team that partnered with NASA's external habitat group, developing a carbon dioxide storage system for future space habitats. That work recently took her to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to see where their system would integrate with existing equipment.  

She tends to err on the side of understatement when describing that project. 

"Since it is with NASA," she said, smiling, "I can't really say too much." 

A Goldwater Scholarship nominee and member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, Hutchinson is a co-author on a paper published in the ACS Nano journal and is preparing her first lead-author manuscript for submission.  

That determination started early. 

The Cold Email 

Her path to the university started the summer before she arrived on campus.  

Hutchinson searched the chemical engineering faculty page, found a professor working in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine and wrote to him.  

She had watched a TED Talk about planarian worms, creatures that can regenerate half their bodies when cut in two, and knew that was the world she wanted to enter. She told him she would be happy copying data into a spreadsheet, anything at all. 

"Lillian stood out to me from the beginning because she didn't wait for a college syllabus to start her career," said Jorge Almodovar, who was then an associate professor of chemical engineering at the U of A and is now at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.  

"Seeing a high school student take the initiative to cold call a professor is rare, and it was clear then that she possessed the drive and curiosity required for national-level success." 

Almodovar gave her a real project: developing dissolving microneedle patches for delivering pain medication to cattle during procedures where animals typically receive no relief.  

For Hutchinson, the appeal was immediate. 

"It was exciting for me to know that they would hurt less," she said. 

Healing Highways 

Today she works in the Therapeutic Testbed Engineering Lab under Younghye Song, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, building three-dimensional collagen scaffolds designed to help the body repair damaged nerves. 

The underlying concept is easier to grasp than it sounds: cells attach to the body's interior building blocks, and the shape of those structures determines whether cells thrive or fail.  

By aligning collagen fibers so cells grow in one direction, "like they're going down a highway," Hutchinson is engineering alternatives to the current standard of care, in which surgeons cut a healthy nerve from one part of the body to patch damage somewhere else. 

"My goal is to make this structure that has cells in it that are going, 'Let's heal; let's make the body happier,' and put that in the damaged area instead of having to pull from somewhere else," she said. 

The Ralph E. Martin Department of Chemical Engineering, where over 87% of graduates participate in experiential learning and over one-third engage in undergraduate research, has made that kind of opportunity part of its culture. 

'Don't Come Crying to Me' 

Not everyone saw the same future for Hutchinson that she saw for herself. In high school, a guidance counselor discouraged her from enrolling in a challenging course.  

"Okay, don't come crying to me two weeks from now when I can't get you out of that class," the counselor told her. Hutchinson took the class anyway and excelled in it. Her parents, especially her father, an electrical engineer turned physician, never wavered in their encouragement. But the memory stayed with her, and it shaped what she decided to do next. 

Keisha Walters, the Chemical Engineering Department head, said the experience is more common than people realize. Walters, a first-generation college graduate, attended a magnet math and science high school in South Carolina where no teacher or counselor ever once mentioned engineering as a career possibility. Her husband, a mechanical engineering professor, heard the opposite from every math and science teacher he had from the age of 12. 

"For him it was an echo chamber," she said. "For me, engineering was never whispered in my direction." 

Big Sister Energy 

In April 2024, Hutchinson launched The Lab Notebook Podcast. The idea crystallized when her younger sister started applying to colleges and kept asking how to get into a research lab. 

"I needed a place to compile everything that I've learned and share it with people," Hutchinson said. Episodes cover the basics that no one teaches you outright: how to join a lab, what to expect from lab meetings, how to read a scientific paper, what questions to ask before choosing a graduate school. She wanted it to feel approachable, like advice from a big sister, not a lecture from an authority figure. 

"I wanted it to be for somebody who is like, 'I don't even know where to start,'" she said. 

Walters said Hutchinson's podcast opens doors that many students don't even know are closed. "Not everybody has a big sister, if you would, saying, 'These are the questions you should ask,'" Walters said.  

"The podcast presents information in accessible bits that students can listen to in their dorm room when the question comes to mind." 

Full Circle 

In January 2025, Hutchinson returned to Little Rock Central High School to present about undergraduate research to a room full of students considering their own futures, some of them not unlike the girl who once sat in that same building, ignoring her notes to chase tiny creatures across a glass slide. 

She will graduate in May with acceptances to multiple doctoral programs and a first-author paper on the way. She describes herself without apology: "I know what I want, and when I decide about what I want, I'm not going to change my mind. I'm going to make sure that I make it happen." 

Hutchinson said she wants what she builds in the lab to end up in a hospital someday, saving lives, making people hurt less. But she also just loves the work itself. 

"I'm doing something that nobody has really done before," she said, "and I'm finding things out that nobody knows. It's fun to discover things." 

It is the same joy of discovery that once held a child captive at a microscope, now refined and focused, watching tiny, invisible worlds reveal themselves, one slide at a time. 

About the College of Engineering: The University of Arkansas College of Engineering is the state's largest engineering school, offering graduate and undergraduate degrees, online studies and interdisciplinary programs. It enrolls more than 4,700 students and employs more than 150 faculty and researchers along with nearly 200 staff members. Its research enterprise generated $47 million in new research awards in Fiscal Year 2025. The college's strategic plan, Vision 2035, seeks to build the premier STEM workforce in accordance with three key objectives: Initiating lifelong student success, generating transformational and relevant knowledge, and becoming the destination of choice among educators, students, staff, industry, alumni and the community. As part of this, the college is increasing graduates and research productivity to expand its footprint as an entrepreneurial engineering platform serving Arkansas and the world. The college embraces its pivotal role in driving economic growth, fueling innovation and educating the next generation of engineers, computer scientists and data scientists to address current and future societal challenges.