Destining and Teaching a House Course: “The Science and Social Impact of Emerging Medical Technologies”
I am also currently co-teaching a House Course that I designed with my close friend, Ayden Case, on “The Science and Social Impact of Emerging Medical Technologies” where we deliver focused content on personalized medicine, regenerative medicine, and high performance diagnostic tools and dissect the ethical and societal implications of these advancements. This course is an introduction to major technological advancements in medicine that are currently revolutionizing patient care (or will be in the near future), and a discussion of the social, ethical, and health equality implications of these advancements. The class is designed for students of all backgrounds to involve them in science and increase their scientific literacy.
As the syllabus says, “The last 100 years have seen a revolution in the ways in which we treat human health, from the application of X-Rays as a diagnostic tool, to the creation of antibiotics, to the development of chemotherapy, it is safe to say that the current standards of healthcare have enabled us to diagnose and treat patients to a level that has no parallel in human history. What’s exciting is that this medical revolution continues to accelerate with new technologies that promise to raise the bar of healthcare ever higher! However, at the forefront of these new avenues of clinical treatment come new questions regarding the moral and socioeconomic consequences of such rapid advancement. As we inch closer to the grand goal of solving all medical ailments, we must reflect on the inequality within medicine and the progress that is still to be made. “
Increasing public scientific literacy and inspiring people of all backgrounds to get involved in the process of science is extremely important in an age or rapid technological advancement. To improve equity in medicine, we must analyze and carefully think about the many social implications of medical advancements to successfully address health disparities and socioeconomic issues such as access, cost, technological bias, and unequal outcome.
BME Design Fellows
Mentor: Dr. Mark Palmeri
To explore the entrepreneurial component of the challenge I will be participating in the BME Design Fellows Program next year. It is a program that is designed to give engineers practical experience with the design process as it relates to the field of biomedical research and entrepreneurial engineering. As a Fellow, I have been placed in a team of 5 BME students tasked with developing a low-cost NICU (Newborn Intensive Care Unit) Incubator in collaboration with Dr. Sharla Rent of the Duke University Department of Pediatrics in the Division of Neonatology and clinical medical professionals in Ethiopia.
The goal of this project is to provide a low-cost option to advance the standard of neonatal care in low-resource settings. We are currently at the ideation and brainstorming stage of the project and identifying and mapping User Needs to Quantifiable Specifications and Ideal Values by discussing the project with the client. We will be formulating potential design solutions by the end of the semester and next semester we will go on to start the iterative design process and work towards the creation of a successful deliverable design solution to aid in neonatal medical care.