A Journey from Leonardo Da Vinci to Biomedical Engineering

Most of us never think about what’s happening beneath our skin. How tissues shift, how blood flows, how cells behave. We rely on technology to reveal the invisible. But behind every medical image that guides a diagnosis, there’s a scientist who once asked a deceptively simple question: How do we see what the eye can’t?

For Dr. Caroline Boudoux, that question arrived early at age five during a visit to a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. While most children were captivated by the flying machines, she was struck by another mystery: the inner mechanics of the human body. That moment, vivid and strangely formative, planted a lifelong fascination that would eventually carry her from Quebec City to MIT and into the heart of biophotonics, the field that uses light to explore the body from within.

Her path wasn’t linear. It wasn’t even planned. In fact, she describes her career as a mix of ambition, well-timed mentorship, hard-reflective work, and serendipity. What sets her apart is how she embraced each twist, a research opportunity, a book idea, a chance to publish her book, pushing them as launchpads to expand her toolkit and sharpen her purpose, providing well-guided and accurate insights to other researchers and scientists.

Boudoux is known for pushing the limits of medical imaging. Her work with optical coherence tomography has helped pave the way for faster, sharper, more accessible diagnostic tools. But what makes her story compelling isn’t just the science, it’s the mindset behind it. She’s someone who believes knowledge is meant to be demystified, not guarded. She believes that young researchers deserve transparency about the realities of graduate school, and that curiosity is the real currency of innovation.

Her book, It Goes Without Saying: Taking the Guesswork Out of Your PhD in Engineering, reflects that philosophy. It’s part field guide, part survival manual, part candid reflection on the emotional and intellectual labor behind a PhD.

The Takeaway

This feature takes you through the story behind Dr. Caroline Boudoux research, her writing, and the ideas shaping the next generation of medical imaging. Her persistence and curiosity nailed the way women are seen in the Biomedical field. It’s a look at how a child’s fascination with the unseen became a career built on illuminating what’s hidden and why that matters now more than ever.