Global Health
Taking the Lead in Education and Prevention
The influence of technology on global health is undeniable, but it’s clear that technology alone won’t prevent disease, reduce infant mortality rates or improve the overall health of people in some of the world’s poorest communities. This is something that Rebecca Richards-Kortum knows from personal experience, but she has some big ideas for solving global health problems, and they’re all about changing the world one Rice undergraduate at a time.
Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering, has learned a lot about the health issues of women in developing countries through her work on new imaging techniques for diagnosing cervical cancer and its precursors. While in these countries, she saw that many women didn’t have access to basic screening programs and other preventative technologies that women elsewhere take for granted.
“There have been many radical technological advances in recent years,” she said, “but they are useless if they’re not affordable or accessible to the people who need them.”
The challenges are deep: How do you help communities prevent waterborne disease if they don’t know that bacteria and other organisms in water cause disease? And how do you deploy modern technology in remote and often harsh environments, where power sources and spare parts are nonexistent?
Since arriving at Rice in 2005, Richards-Kortum has spearheaded two programs to address these challenges. Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, began in 2006 and aims to train Rice undergraduates in applying science and technology to global health issues. Richards-Kortum also is leading Rice 360°, a $100 million campuswide initiative launched in 2007 and a priority of the Centennial Campaign. Building on the educational efforts seeded by BTB, Rice 360° incorporates faculty research focused on inventing new health technologies and seeks to create innovative ways to commercialize and distribute them in the developing world. Richards-Kortum’s two initiatives have done more than demonstrate the power of this model — they are empowering Rice undergraduates to quite literally change the world.
Providing Aid That’s Sustainable
Neha Kamat ’08 spent most of her undergraduate career working in the lab of Jennifer West, the Isabel C. Cameron Professor of Bioengineering. While she enjoyed her research projects at Rice, Kamat admits she felt rudderless about where she was going after graduation. “I knew I wanted to do research, but I had no clue how I would apply it as a career,” Kamat said. “Would I work in industry? Would I go into academia?”
All that changed during Kamat’s senior year, when she enrolled in BIOE 260: Introduction to Global Health Issues. One of several courses offered through BTB, it also has become the introductory course in a new global health technologies minor that Rice began offering this fall.
The challenges are deep: How do you help communities prevent aterborne disease if they don’t know that bacteria and other organisms in water cause disease?
In BIOE 260, students learn about global health challenges — including health determinants and key areas of disease burden — and examine case studies to understand why different interventions succeed or fail. The students also work in small groups to solve a real-world problem and have the opportunity to deliver their solution through BTB internships offered in conjunction with outside partners such as the Baylor College of Medicine’s Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative and SOS Children’s Villages.
Although Kamat is a bioengineering student, she worked with four other BIOE 260 students to develop a microenterprise training program for students at Masianokeng High School in Lesotho. Microenterprise is a relatively new concept in foreign aid that calls for training individuals within a community to form businesses that will sell vital commodities such as medicine, clinical services or supplies. Microenterprises not only offer necessary resources in a sustainable way, they also fuel economic growth by providing jobs to community members.
Kamat and Will Rice sophomore Josh Ozer, who launched a microenterprise student club at Rice during his freshman year, delivered the microenterprise course in Lesotho. The course taught basic principles in business planning, marketing and accounting by dividing students into teams that sold solar flashlights in the community. Part of the proceeds from the sales supported the school shop, and each team kept a percentage as profit. By the end of the five-week course, students had raised around $500 to start the school shop and had built capital to invest in their own enterprises.
Kamat also took the bioengineering capstone design course, in which her team of bioengineers and electrical engineers produced one of the top design projects in the George R. Brown School of Engineering: an intravenous drip monitor and controller specifically designed for pediatric patients in the developing world. Kamat credits both experiences, particularly her time in Lesotho, with providing focus for her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. She now plans to stay in academia and, like Richards-Kortum, find ways to develop sustainable global health technologies.
“Before this program, I only saw the opportunity to make an impact through technology,” Kamat said. “But the truth is that technology doesn’t solve problems. You have to take into account the social, physical and economic issues that influence how the technology will be adopted.”
Undergrad Teamwork
The drip monitor developed by Kamat’s team was just one of the global health projects undertaken by students in the bioengineering capstone design course this year. Traditionally, capstone courses offer undergraduate engineers the chance to do the type of work they will be charged with after graduation. But now, thanks to the global health initiatives championed by Richards-Kortum, the technical design experience in bioengineering is being enriched with know-how from the social and political sciences.
Through a new course in the global health technologies minor, nonengineering students have the opportunity to participate on bioengineering capstone design teams. Martel seniors Tiffany Yeh, a cognitive sciences major, and Katy Miller, double majoring in English and history, are the first nonengineers to take advantage of the opportunity. Both bring significant, hands-on experience in global health issues to the course. Last year, they were members of a BIOE 260 team that created an interactive module to teach second-grade students in Haiti about basic hygiene and the causes of infections and illness.
“Our team exemplified how important interdisciplinary knowledge is when working on global health problems,” Yeh said. “We had insights from the humanities, science and psychology on our team, and all of those perspectives helped us move forward.”
The team ultimately developed an array of activities for its unit. T-shirts with pictures of human organs Velcroed to them helped students visualize what was under their skin. A hand-washing song and dance taught hygiene. Students also learned how to purify water and looked at water under a microscope to see microorganisms. Finally, students demonstrated what they had learned by performing skits for their parents that explained how the immune system works. After implementing the project in Haiti, Yeh and teammate Meagan Barry ’08 went on to work on water sourcing issues in Guatemala. Miller spent the summer in Geneva researching the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS programs in the Caribbean.
Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and instructor for the bioengineering capstone design course, noted that bringing together students from diverse backgrounds can lead to more relevant and successful project outcomes.
“Just because the end product needs to be inexpensive or simple to use doesn’t mean that the technology that goes into that product will be easy to develop or inexpensive,” said Oden.
"Sometimes these low-tech solutions require the most innovation, and they definitely require insights about the environment and culture in which they will be used. By bringing in students from across the university with expertise accumulated through global health course work and associated internships, we enable our design teams to accomplish these innovations and create more relevant and usable devices.”
Taking It to the Real World
The link between BTB and the design course also adds reality and urgency to what could easily be viewed merely as academic exercises. Plus, students have the opportunity not only to implement their design projects but also to pass on their knowledge to future field and design teams.
One bioengineering capstone design project that has benefited from student cooperation over time is the diagnostic Lab-in-a-Backpack. Over a span of two years, a total of 12 Rice undergraduates worked on the backpack. Initially developed by a five-member capstone bioengineering design team in 2006, the backpack was field-tested in Honduras by volunteers with the Baylor Shoulder to Shoulder Program. Last year, a second group of seven students, including two teams in BIOE 260, made several improvements to the backpack and prepared it for a second field test in Lesotho. One of these seven was Jenna Hook, a Martel senior who took the backpack to Lesotho and gathered more information on modifying it to help individuals in the different communities she visited.
“Most of the clinics in Lesotho had electricity — what they didn’t have were supplies and equipment,” Hook explained. “I collected information from health workers everywhere I went because it is really important to understand the need in order to find the best ways to meet it.”
Such on-the-fly observations and modifications are what make the global health course work and internships so valuable to students.
“There are many programs around where students can get experience working in developing countries, but none of them place so much responsibility, ultimately, on you as a student,” said Barry, one of the developers of the Haiti education module who is working in Mali this fall with a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar on malaria drug resistance. “In the Rice global health program, students are the ones coming up with the plans and implementing them, and we report our experiences to others at Rice and to our partners so that they can do it better next time. We are where the buck stops, and it’s amazing to have this type of an impact on the world as undergraduates.”
Sophie Kim ’08 concurred. Kim implemented an HIV/AIDS awareness project in Lesotho in 2007 and this year coordinated a community needs assessment there. She also worked this summer with Healthcare for the Homeless — Houston to determine how homeless people in Houston utilize health care services. This fall, as a Fulbright Scholar, she began studying Toronto’s HIV/AIDS populations at the Center for Research on Inner City Health.
“You can let what you see while working in this program frustrate you, or you can let it fill you with a stronger drive and a bigger purpose,” Kim said. “Working in Lesotho changed the way I did everything my senior year. I studied harder for exams and did markedly better in my classes. That’s because I had something bigger I was working toward. It wasn’t about getting into medical school anymore. It was about helping people better themselves.”
Learn more:
Rice 360
Beyond Traditional Borders
Kamat said that sense of ownership is one of the reasons behind the program’s success.
“There’s no safety net in this program,” she said. “If your program doesn’t work, it fails. That’s it. I put more time into the microenterprise project than any other course in my college career, because I knew that it was my responsibility. You could call it a burden, but it’s a burden that trains students to be global leaders.”