Wow, it has been a week already! We have been very busy and hit the ground running in week one, meeting our teams, clients, international collaborators, and mentors. Entering this internship, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t at all nervous about being the only virtual intern. However, as I sit in my room in Lahore, Pakistan, I feel connected with not only everyone else in the program, but also with my own roots.
A little bit about myself: I am a rising junior at Baker College studying bioengineering. I have been involved with public health from early on — I was along my mother’s side when she was a frontline health worker during the Pakistani dengue fever epidemic. A year later, I was a volunteer two floors away. Coming to Rice as an international student, I knew I wanted to translate my experiences into something even more impactful. Over the course of my two years at Rice, I have met so many exceptional people who have empowered me to work in global health. I have been able to advocate for global health to Congress representatives, fundraise for pressing global health challenges, and raise awareness on-campus about important global health issues. Now, with this internship, I can go a step further and combine my love for design with my passion for global health.
This summer, I am a part of Team “Now UV Me, Now U Don’t” with Abby and Vanessa. Our team is working to create a sterilization device that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to decontaminate personal protective equipment (PPE) in low-resource clinical settings. We are primarily focusing on N95 masks, although we hope our device will be applicable to a range of protective gear. The pandemic that we find ourselves living through has shown us the great need for PPE. However, even outside of the COVID pandemic, the widespread prevalence of airborne diseases like tuberculosis in low-resource settings necessitates having a sustainable access to PPE.
This week, we met with our three mentors, who are among the leaders of their respective design studios in Houston, Tanzania, and Malawi. We were able to gain crucial insight into the clinical contexts we are designing for. Different versions of the Steribox device already exist in Tanzania, Malawi, and Houston. We hope to redesign and improve many aspects of the device that is based in Houston, as it is the most advanced and newest addition. We were pleased to learn that there is another group of interns based in Malawi who are working on redesigning the Malawian version of the device (which has some key functional differences). Some (broad) areas where we hope to improve the device are mechanical design, usability, and sustainability.
In the coming weeks, I will be blogging about the progress our team makes on the Steribox. I can’t wait to see how my team and I grow!
— F