Hello everyone! I am Sonali Mahendran, a rising junior studying bioengineering at Rice University. This summer, I’m working as an intern with Rice 360°, getting a feel for developing global health technologies. More specifically, I’ll be working on IncuBaby, an incubator for neonates in low resource settings.
The night before my first day, I found out that the Rice 360° tech team was moving to the Richards-Kortum lab in the BRC. So, Days 2 and 3 were devoted to the move, more like team bonding, I’d say! By the end of it I was on par with the rest of the team as far as locating materials. 
On Monday of the following week, I participated in my first weekly team meeting, catching up on what tasks had been accomplished during the previous week and listing what else needed to be done during the upcoming week. For the first couple of weeks, I’ve been tasked with creating a control box for our temperature sensor testing. I’ll be testing the accuracy of the temperature sensor on adults as well as on babies in the Rice daycare. So instead of taking the whole Elvis breadboard prototype to the tests, we’ll have compact, less intimidating-looking testing equipment. For the rest of Monday, I sketched 3 or 4 layout plans for the control box circuit.
On Tuesday at the OEDK, I learned to solder and immediately put those skills to use by soldering the control box circuit onto a perf board. And along the way, I learned to desolder, too, as I made mistakes and continued to learn from them. It was truly rewarding to see that the circuit I soldered was up and running! And on the back, my soldering technique (a work in progress)!
On Wednesday, I helped with some temperature accuracy testing on Simubaby (an IV bag filled with heated water) and then attended a meeting with the Rice 360° directors Dr. Richards-Kortum and Dr. Oden. This allowed me to get a sense of the expectations for such formal type of meeting, compared to those of the more informal weekly team meetings that I had first attended.
On Thursday and Friday, I continued to work on testing the circuit on the perf board. On top of that, I began to tweak Arduino code so that we can more accurately relate the resistor values of the thermistor to the temperature of the baby. I also began planning out how things will fit in the control box. Looks like I’ll be getting some laser cutting experience soon!
My first week working with Rice 360° has been a wonderful experience, and I’ve already learned so much and have met amazing people! I look forward to taking on more project tasks and learning valuable technical skills throughout this internship!
