But the low points, Venetta discovered, provided some invaluable insights that work for sports, as well as research. For one thing, she now realizes that failure is essential in both enterprises. There’s the old saying in research, “if you don’t fail, you’re not trying.” That’s something Venetta learned while wearing a pair of skates.

“Figure skating, of all sports, teaches you how to fall and get back up,” she said. “You don't really have another option. You cannot get better at figure skating without accepting that you're going to fall.”

Where Science Meets Sports

What fascinated Venetta about skating — the precision, the way the body works in perfect coordination — is what eventually drew her to biomedical engineering.

“As an athlete, you become so in tune with your body, and you become familiar with what the body can achieve at an elite level,” Venetta noted. “I’ve always been pretty good at math and science, and I've also always been fascinated by the human body and how it works.”

Her minor in physiology deepened her understanding of the body, while a biomechanics class showed her the physics of how the body comes together in motion.

“Figure skating is all about biomechanics,” she said.

For Venetta, this study of human motion has mirrored what she loves about figure skating: breaking down every move, every fraction of a second, to fully understand the mechanics.

When she was training, her coach, Christy Krall, broke down each jump Venetta made through video analysis, dissecting her form, frame by frame. Venetta recalled, “She’d say, ‘Your elbow’s out here. Try imagining throwing salt over your shoulder before takeoff.’ And somehow, it worked.”

One of Venetta’s favorite classes at Georgia Tech has been Materials Science and Engineering of Sports, taught by Jud Ready, Ph.D., principal research engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

“We studied a range of sports — baseball, soccer, basketball, skiing, golf — examining how equipment has evolved with the needs of the athletes,” she said. The class also took field trips to sports facilities and met with experts to learn how regulations and technology in the sports world have shaped modern gear.

And when it came to figure skating, Venetta stepped in as the resident expert, sharing with the class her knowledge and experience with skates and the equipment involved in the sport.

“Dr. Ready is very pro- student athlete, very pro- student success,” Venetta said. “He offered a lot of opportunities for us as his students, to go further into research or find employment.”

One of those opportunities led Venetta to a research position at GTRI, where her research interests shifted to studying nanoparticles in bladder cancer therapy in GTRI’s Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory. 

“Doing something with a medical application is important to me,” she said. And bladder cancer presents a worthy challenge because it is particularly difficult to eradicate.

After removing a tumor, for example, “there may be smaller pieces left behind, because they're too small to detect or they look like normal cells, but really they're part of the tumor,” she said.

At GTRI, she focused on an approach that precisely targeted the leftover cancerous cells using laser ablation and nanoparticles called fullerenes. Her team worked on a project that engineered fullerenes so that they could bind specifically to bladder cancer cells.

“So, if you were to hit it with a laser, it would create a small, localized, combustion reaction, killing the cancer cells, but not the healthy cells around it,” she said.