Hello everyone!

My name is Sara Barker, and I’m a rising senior at Rice University. I’m studying Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Global Health Technologies. This summer, I’m participating in Rice 360’s internship program, where I will be working on developing a device to assist in testing for E. coli in water sources in low resource settings. I’ll be taking this project on along with my teammates on Team Petri-FI. If you’re curious about the name, think Petri as in Petri dish, or in our case, Petrifilm, and FI as in Field Incubator (more on what those terms mean later). Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for such an inventive name. We’re super excited to get a start on this project!

As our team name suggests, our task is to develop a field incubator to incubate Petrifilms for 48 hours. What exactly is a field incubator? To explain an incubator, think about how chicken eggs are hatched.

An example of an egg incubator. Source: https://diyprojects.com/homemade-incubator/

They have to be kept warm while the chicks grow inside the egg. We want to do the exact same thing, but with colonies of bacteria. Researchers who are studying water quality have to go out into the field and collect samples for testing, but any bacteria in the water are too small to see without a high-powered microscope – not something you want to lug around rural Africa or South America. Our solution is to use Petrifilms.

Petrifilm. Source: http://cels.uri.edu/docslink/ww/BacteriaWorkshop/EColi3MPetrifilm.pdf

They act just like Petri dishes – you drop some water on the pink circle, and any bacteria in that water will form colonies that will grow to be large enough to be visible to the naked eye in about 48 hours. Here’s what E. coli colonies look like on a Petrifilm:

E. coli on a petrifilm. The blue dots are E. coli colonies. Source: http://cels.uri.edu/docslink/ww/BacteriaWorkshop/EColi3MPetrifilm.pdf

Our task is to develop a device that can keep these Petrifilms at around 35-37°C continuously for 48 hours. It needs to be portable, run on a single charge, and maintain the set temperature. We’ll also be looking at implementing some advanced “smart” features, such as displaying a graph of temperature fluctuations over time on an LED screen.

However, before we can start implementing all these features, we have to do some research. This past week was spent mostly doing just that. We’ve found out a lot about E. coli – did you know fish pond water won’t have E. coli because E. coli only lives in the digestive tracts of warm-blooded animals? We’ve also been examining some past prototypes of the same project. They have different physical designs, and their respective codes are somewhat different, so we’ll have to find the best features of each design and combine them into one product.

This week, we’re going to continue to examine previous prototypes, and we’ll also outline our design criteria in preparation for building our own device. Team Petri-FI is ready to dive into this project, and I hope this blog’s readers are as excited as we are to make some progress.

See you soon in the next blog,

Sara

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

Hello! My name is Kaitlyn Heintzelman, and I am a rising junior at Rice University. I am a Bioengineering and Biochemistry & Cell Biology major on the Premed track, minoring in Global Health Technologies.

This past week has been a fantastic start to this internship, and I’m really excited about what the coming weeks will bring!

I feel like the components of this internship that I am looking most forward to are the opportunity to engage with teammates in an in-person manner to develop a solution, as well as the opportunity to gain some technical knowledge that will assist me in my future coursework. In this regard, I am particularly excited about the opportunity to participate in the in-person version of this internship, as I feel like a lot of emphasis is put on both of the aforementioned areas.

As far as my project is concerned, I will be working alongside teammates Rachel, Samuel, and Christopher, as well as our TAs, Christian and Andrew, in the development of a heart and lung motion model. Through its modeling of the cumulative motion of the heart and lungs, this model will allow for the testing of, among other devices and techniques, a wirelessly powered pacemaker when it is being powered from a transmitter. This past Friday, we had the opportunity to visit our clients and tour their laboratory at the Texas Heart Institute. It was really cool to see the current model of the device in motion, and this experience really helped our team gain a better understanding of our project aims. Moreover, my team will be working on the development of a submersible version of this heart and lung motion model that will interface directly with the tissue samples. Overall, this project seems like it will be able to help me develop some technical skills that I do not have much experience with, such as 3D printing, while also allowing me to further grow in other areas that I do, such as coding and circuits. I really look forward to further developing this device over the course of the internship and the opportunity to collaborate with our clients to gain valuable feedback.

Following our initial client interview, my team and I have set out to further understand the needs and requirements of the model by researching models with similar aims, as well as into the mechanics behind normal heart and lung motion. Overall, this was a great first week, and I can’t wait to see what the future will hold.

Signing off,

Kaitlyn

It’s funny how growing up, I always used the words “third-world” or “developing” to describe the countries I am now working to serve. I assumed it was the most accurate way to convey them. I also assumed that people in these countries wanted to live like we do in the U.S–a life of comfort and convenience.

As I’ve come to learn this week, assumptions can be proven wrong. 

I was inspired to pursue a global health-centered career by a service trip to Nicaragua back in high school. My mom immigrated from Nicaragua when she was young, so I was thrilled to work alongside the people of my ancestry. I brought my assumptions about “third-world countries” with me, but it took less than 24 hours for me to toss them out the window once I realized that I have never seen a people more happy than the Nicaraguans I had the privilege to work with. Although they lacked houses or access to running water, I was welcomed into Nicaragua with open arms, offered gifts, and given so many genuine smiles from strangers that are so hard to come by in the states. I assumed I would feel separated from my people–I did grow up in the U.S., after all–but I was blown away by the joy, acceptance, and welcoming spirit of the Nicaraguans.

Just as I learned to set aside my assumptions on my service trip to Nicaragua, I was reminded of this lesson through my team’s conversation with our international collaborators on the Steribox project, Will Moyo and Julia Jenjezwa. Again, I noticed my assumptions fall away, this time about the device design itself. 

For context, our project seeks to sterilize personal protective equipment (PPE) using UVC germicidal light. While coming up with questions to ask Will and Julia, my team assumed we would a) work to design for a set number of masks to be sterilized (e.g. 50 at a time); b) the device would be mainly transported between clinics; and c) since we were working with “developing countries,” we had to keep it beneath a set cost. 

Will and Julia had innovative responses to each of these points: a) why couldn’t we focus on a more standardized metric, such as masks per unit time, instead? b) the device would mainly be transported within a specific clinic, such as down hallways or elevators; and c) instead of worrying about a set maximum cost, we should focus on justifying the cost of each item so that our device is worth its investment. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced so many “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments in a single meeting. 

Long story short, the first big lesson I’ve learned in this internship is the importance of examining my assumptions. Is it logical to assume that just because the Nicaraguans have less material goods than we do in the U.S., they have less happiness than we do? No! I have never met a more joyful people than the Nicaraguans. Does it make sense to assume that rigid design standards such as a set number of masks or maximum cost are ideal to create a contextualized sterilization device? Absolutely not. Justification is often a more important criterion when it comes to creating these objectives. Whether they be about a project or a population, I will definitely be digging in deeper to my assumptions from now on.

Prior to the first week, I had much anticipation for the Rice SEED/360 internship and how it would pan out for the next 6 weeks and I’m glad to say I really enjoyed this first week. The presentations were extremely helpful how they presented information on the Engineering Design Process and I very much enjoyed the workshops. Developing skills and characteristics as not only an engineer, but as a person were things I experienced when taking ENGI 120 during my freshmen fall semester and what encouraged me to apply to SEED. These workshops definitely showed that Rice SEED/360 was very much as invested in my personal development as I was.

For this internship, my team and I will be working with Texas Heart Institute to develop a model to mimic the lung heart model for the purpose of testing their wireless pacemaker. I spent much of the first week researching background information for device pertaining to lung heart motion and the function of pacemakers. During our meeting with our clients at THI on Friday, our team was introduced to the saline-immersed apparatus that THI wants our device to function in. Much focus was given by our clients on having our model accurately depict the combine contractions and motions of the lung and heart on the tissue they will have clamped in the system. Creating the accurate motion of the lung heart motion has definitely shown to be a challenge, but is something I am really excited to take on during this internship. I am also very much excited to work with the colleagues on my team with each person bringing their own different backgrounds to develop a useful and functional solution. Much of this next week will be spent defining and decomposing our design criteria and brainstorming ways to mimic the lung heart model on the actual tissue in the saline solution. Hopefully, our team can ideate some possible innovative solutions for our client meeting we plan to have again some time towards the end of this week.

Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual abuse. Please take care of yourself and feel free to forgo reading any parts of this blog. 

 

As I went to bed the night before my internship began, I was definitely filled with some first day jitters. Unsure of what to expect, I was both excited and nervous. Excited for the impactful projects we would work on and amazing people we would meet, but nervous that I wasn’t prepared or skilled enough to succeed. Walking into the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) Monday morning, my nerves quickly subsided. Dr. Taylor and her staff were incredibly welcoming, and I soon recognized many faces. As we navigated through orientation, my excitement augmented as we neared the project reveal time. 

Choosing a project was tough! Each and every project has such an opportunity for impact, and they all have amazing clients and collaborators. Finally, after much deliberation, I settled on the pediatric pelvic model. The goal of this project is to design a model that will aid in training nurses on how to conduct pelvic examinations for pediatric sexual abuse survivors. While I knew this project would be challenging due to the heavy subject matter, I am up for the challenge, as I believe this project has the potential for huge impact. Additionally, I like the idea of starting a project from the ground up, allowing my team to develop what we believe to be the best model. 

After the project reveal, we had the opportunity to get to know our team. My team quickly decided on a name: Team PIPER, which stands for Pediatric Instructional Pelvic Examination Resource. The members of my team are Elise from Rice University, Shivani from Rice University, and Alex from The University of Texas at Austin. Our TAs are Magdah and Sana, both from Rice University. Our team quickly bonded, and we continued to get to know each other throughout the week during workshops, project work times, and lunch. Additionally, we went to Rice village on Thursday night for team bonding in the form of burgers and boba- yum! We also had an epic Just Dance battle during our break on Friday. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know my team, and I’m excited to continue to work with them throughout the remainder of the summer.

As far as project progress goes, my team focused on our initial client meeting and research this week. We created interview questions for our client, Ms. Nancy Harris. Bright and early Thursday morning, we met with Ms. Harris to hear more of her vision for our project and get some of our clarifying questions answered. I found Ms. Harris to be incredibly passionate and informed on this topic, and her enthusiasm for our team and project shined through. After this meeting, we dove into research. Initially, we found it difficult to locate reputable sources on this topic. However, once we got started, we were able to find numerous sources through library databases and Google Scholar. We focused our research on background information about child sexual abuse and pelvic examinations, exploration of any existing pelvic examination teaching models, and materials research. At the conclusion of this week, we have compiled many sources and have learned loads of useful information that will aid in the development of our model. 

Outside of project time, I had the opportunity to participate in numerous workshops from various offices at Rice and abroad. Workshops covered a wide variety of topics, from engineering design to interpersonal skills. My favorites were the hand tools workshop and the time management workshop. In the hand tools workshop, we learned about the basic hand tools in the OEDK while creating a bat house. Even though I had previously participated in this workshop in ENGI 120 (Introduction to Engineering Design- a class I took last semester), I found it to be a great refresher on tools that could come in handy when prototyping our model. The time management workshop was presented by the Wellbeing & Counseling Center. I found the workshop to be very engaging, and time management tips are always beneficial for busy college students. 

Overall, I had a wonderful first week in this internship. I love that the program combines both project time and professional development workshops, as this gives interns holistic development in both hands-on design and interpersonal skills. I’ve also enjoyed getting to know my team and the other interns. Everyone brings such unique perspectives and skills, and I know we will continue to make memories throughout the rest of the summer. As we move into week two, the engineer in me is excited to begin focusing on design details and development of our pediatric pelvic model. After a great first week, I am excited to see the impactful work that my team and others will produce this summer.

See y’all soon,

Shannon

These are the lovely interns and TAs I’ve gotten to meet and interact with this week!

*Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual abuse. Please exercise self-care while reading.

Hello! Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting updates and reflections about my experiences working in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) on campus in Houston as a Rice 360° summer intern. I am so excited and thankful for the opportunity for exposure to the engineering design process in a health-related project.

Before I jump into my blog, I’d like to tell you a bit about who I am and how I ended up as an intern this summer. My name is Shivani, I’m from Dallas (but my family is from Maharashtra, India), and I’m a rising sophomore at Lovett College here at Rice! I’m majoring in Neuroscience on the pre-med track, and planning to minor in Global Health Technologies. I’m involved on campus as a member of Rasikas (Rice’s South Asian classical dance team), a content writer in Catalyst (Rice’s undergraduate science research journal), the secretary of University Court, and as a peer academic advisor. In my free time, you can usually find me either hanging out around Lovett or getting an iced latte (with honey) at Rice Coffeehouse.

I became especially interested in pursuing a Global Health Technologies minor after taking GLHT 201: Introduction to Global Health during my first semester. Coming from a natural sciences and pre-medical background, how could I get direct experience with the intersection between health sciences and actual implementation of health technologies? This internship was the answer, and I’d like nothing more than to design and develop a real-world, impactful technology and collaborate with a group of people who share my commitment to health equity.

This summer, I’ll be collaborating with fellow interns Elise Erickson, Shannon McGill, and Alex Natelson (watch for their blogs too!) in partnership with our wonderful client Nancy Harris, the TeleSAFE Director of Operations at United Concierge Medicine and director of a forensic examiner nurse training program in New York. Our team name is PIPER – Pediatric Instructional Pelvic Examination Resource. We will be working to develop the first-ever hands-on pediatric pelvic model intended to help clinical providers learn how to and gain confidence in evaluating pediatric survivors of sexual assault. Currently, child sexual abuse affects roughly 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys at least once during childhood, and can have a series of consequences such as injuries, STIs, adverse mental health outcomes, and even a significantly higher risk of sexual victimization in adulthood (1). The fact that we currently lack a hands-on training model for conducting pediatric pelvic examinations makes our team’s project incredibly urgent and potentially highly impactful.

We hope to adapt or at least use insights from LUCIA, an adult cervical cancer screening instructional model developed previously by Rice 360°, while developing our model, which will have some key anatomical and functional differences due to the type of examination for which the model is intended. Although the topic and context of our project is quite heavy, I’m really glad that we have the opportunity to hopefully make an improvement to current training systems and ultimately minimize trauma to pediatric survivors during examinations.

This past week, we worked extensively on understanding the problem context, researching anatomy and its changes as children grow, learning how sexual assault examinations are conducted, and familiarizing ourselves with existing training resources. We also met with Ms. Harris to clarify what issues our model should address, underwent some tools and equipment training, and actually got the chance to observe and interact with the two most recent iterations of the LUCIA model for additional insights.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the coming days, we’re looking to establish concrete and measurable design criteria for our model and start the brainstorming process! We already have several initial ideas but will be able to better organize them once we clarify our design objectives with our client. Our 4-person intern team has already grown quite close, and I’m looking forward to continuing our work and posting updates!

-Shivani

1. Preventing Child Sexual Abuse. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childsexualabuse/fastfact.html. Published April 30, 2021. Accessed June 15, 2021.

Hello! My name is Abby Dowse, and I am a rising junior at Rice majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Global Health Technologies. I am also a very proud member of Lovett College – the best residential college at Rice – and am originally from the state of Wisconsin.

So far, the internship has been off to an amazing start! Coming in, I was simultaneously very excited and also slightly nervous. I have wanted to participate in this internship ever since I first applied to Rice; in fact, I mentioned it in one of my admissions essays! I am extremely passionate about designing medical devices for low-resource countries, and I knew that the Rice 360 internship would give me the very unique opportunity to do just that. In past years, I have loved reading through blogs posted by interns, so I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share my experiences as well. On the other hand, the great work that has been done in previous summers intimidated me slightly, as I questioned whether I had strong enough technical skills to complete something on the same level. However, I think that this opportunity will give me a hands-on opportunity to develop skills in areas I am less confident in.

On the second day of the internship, we were assigned to our projects and found out the groups we would be working with over the summer. Along with three other talented interns, I was assigned to work on the Steribox project! Our team will be working on a mobile device which utilizes UV light to disinfect many N95 masks at one time, and which is being designed for use in low-resource settings. Our job is to improve upon the great work begun by a senior design team last year. 

Over the course of this week, my team’s main focus has been understanding the context of the problem and the need for the device, as well as defining what specific elements of the current prototype need to be modified or improved. In order to gain this information, it was extremely important for our team to talk to our three mentors, who are located in Houston, Malawi, and Tanzania, respectively. Since we are not able to directly visit the sites where the sanitation devices will be used, our international mentors are invaluable.

During our interviews with our clients, we discovered that in many low-resource countries, mask shortages are a major problem. Although these shortages were exacerbated by COVID-19, they were an issue even before the pandemic. In some hospitals, entire infectious disease wards were only given 3 N95 masks per month; therefore, finding a way to safely and effectively disinfect masks so that they can be reused is vital for patient and clinician safety. Previously, masks had been disinfected with chemicals (such as ethanol and chlorine), but these methods only allowed for a single reuse of each mask due to the damaging effects of the chemicals. In addition, researchers at Rice had developed a very effective UV sanitation room, but many smaller, low-resource clinics are unable to give up an entire room. Our device hopes to address these problems.

In addition, our clients provided us with the most important elements of the design to focus on over the next six weeks. These elements include:

1. Mobility – need to be able to move around a hospital
2. Safety – need failsafe to prevent operator exposure to UV light
3. Time – need to decrease run time (maximize number of masks per unit time)
4. Power – due to unreliable power in clinics, device should be off-the-grid
5. Sustainability – use materials that are widely available locally or easy to import
6. Usability – should be able to be operated by one person with minimal training
7. Successfully sterilizes masks – must provide enough light to successfully sanitize all sides of all masks

This week, our team is starting the brainstorming process, in which we will better define design criteria, begin coming up with potential solutions to meet those criteria, and then narrow those solutions down. Our group has already begun coming up with a few preliminary ideas for improving upon the previous team’s device, and I am looking forward to exploring them more. I am very excited to have such a wonderful team and project to work on over the course of this internship, and I cannot wait to see what we accomplish!

My first week here I feel has set the tone for the next few weeks here at my internship, and I can already tell I am going to love my experience here. Seeing all my colleagues that I will be working along side of for the next few weeks has got me excited to give it my all and develop myself further as an engineer and individual. One of the things I picked up almost immediately is how we aren’t called interns, but colleagues, and I felt like it really just set the tone and made me feel like I was really one of the team, and it was just a really nice feeling and made me feel included.

As far as my project is concerned, I am really excited to work on it some more during the following weeks. From our meeting with Dr. Read, I could already tell that it is going to be a pleasure working with him on our project. The Bag Valve Mask monitor seems like it will be able to help me develop some skills that I don’t have too much experience on, such as coding and electrical work. My team will be working on further developing the BVM monitor by making it robust enough to start doing field test and gathering useful data to help improve the user experience of our device. I look forward to connecting with people and getting their user feedback and really connecting with people as part of the engineering design process as opposed to be stuck in the OEDK trying to get the product to work. Its a nice change of pace to begin with optimization instead of building from the ground up.

My team and I have started further developing our understanding of the process by having our first client meeting with Dr. Read from Public Invention, and we feel like we have a further understanding of what our client is trying to accomplish by the end of this 6 weeks. We have also come up with a few simple topics to research and some people we would like to set up a point of contact with such as REMS and we believe we are ready to move on into the next week, and are excited to see what it holds for the team!

I was apprehensive going into this experience. I didn’t know how a virtual internship with team members and collaborators all over the world would run. And gradually, in the six weeks of this internship, I’ve been blown away by how wonderful and educational the experience was. Taking a few weeks to relax, and reflect more on what these six weeks has meant to me, I found that it really boiled down to two things: my teammates and the impact of our projects. 

Meetings with Andrew, Carolyn, and Yankho were some of the highlights of the internship. It’s really crazy to me that in just six weeks, we had already formed such close bonds. I learned more about their cultures, about their families, about our common struggles with testing and schools, and of course, about their passions. They taught me so much as we worked on our projects. It was also really special to see that even though all four of us come from vastly different backgrounds, we still had so much in common where we could relate to one another. By the end of the six weeks, I didn’t feel like I was talking to my teammates, but rather my friends. Even if we don’t talk daily now, we’ve bonded over this experience, and I know that we will stay in touch.

Another main highlight of the internship was seeing the impact of our work in the final week. I remember looking at the 100 participants in Zoom call during the final showcase, and texting our team group chat about it. We were all shocked at the number of people on the call. It gave me an immense sense of satisfaction that people cared about what we did, and that our work would benefit others and be implemented. 

Due to the virtual nature of the internship, It was hard for me to realize the importance of our work. Rather than me being in a design studio, I was sitting in my bedroom staring at a laptop screen. I never grasped the magnitude of what we did until that internship showcase. I was so excited and gratified when we finally finished our presentation, and I was even more delighted to hear the questions from the audience. Since all of our videos were off and everybody was muted, I assumed that people were only passively listening to our presentation. I was wrong. Their questions made it clear that they were truly invested in our projects and wanted to learn more about them. Knowing that the work I did could help impact how protected clinicians are against the COVID-19 virus in Malawi is something that I feel incredibly proud of and humbled by. 

Personally, too, in these few weeks after the internship, I’ve reflected on how I have grown in this short period of time. I’ve become a better teammate — more understanding of different circumstances, a more active listener and more comfortable sharing my own opinion. I’ve gained confidence in myself as an engineer — the trust and support from the faculty members and the Rice 360 Education team gave me the ability to start taking the lead and gave me more faith in myself to trust the importance and value of my own ideas. And I’ve gained a much better understanding of a culture that I had previously known little about.

I can’t thank the many, many people that made this experience possible enough. The donors, Rice 360, the amazing directors, the faculty mentors, the TAs, the immensely talented interns — the list goes on and on. I’m honored that I was part of this program, and I hope that I get to stay involved with these projects and in touch with the people involved in the internship going forward. I’m so proud of the work that my team and I have done, and I had a really amazing six weeks! 

– Bhavya 🙂