Chapter Highlight

Earlier this month, the University of North Carolina EWH Chapter invited technicians from the UNC hospitals system to lead a seminar on electrosurgical units (ESUs). Julio Huerta, CHTM, and Dennis Hildreth, CBET, discussed their work in the UNC BMET department and shared their knowledge and experience from troubleshooting ESU machines in a clinical setting. The Chapter plans to make an instructional video on ESU principals and troubleshooting.

Goodbye January Institutes, Hello Summer Institutes

Our January Institutes in Guatemala, Uganda, and Cambodia hosted 62 participants from Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Canterbury, and the University of New South Wales. Working alongside local technicians, they repaired hospital equipment including centrifuges, infant warmers, and surgical lamps.

"This experience gave me a greater perspective of how the design of medical devices can be improved and made more widely accessible to ALL countries." - Abbi Miller, Guatemala

Now, we are hard at work getting all of our Summer Institute participants ready to go! With programs in the Dominican Republic, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, and Nepal, we had a lot of applicants this year, and we are especially grateful to our Alumni who helped us with the interview process. Thank you!

You can still support this summer's participants:

Design Competition

EWH has already received quite a few entries to this year’s Design Competition! We were especially impressed with EWH-Clemson's seven entries, so we asked Dr. Delphine Dean, the Chapter Advisor, for some insight into their process.

Clemson supports an undergraduate Creative Inquiry team working on “Designing Medical Devices for Developing Countries,” with about 15 students and 4-6 project teams going at a time. The project ideas come from the students. One CI team has students collaborating directly with biomedical engineering students at Arusha Technical College in Tanzania. While the students aren’t necessarily working on the same projects, they do chat about design decisions and give each other advice. Finally, some students want to continue projects they started in class.

Chapter president Alex Nukovic has helped revitalize the Clemson EWH Chapter, which runs mini workshops and professional development activities for students. She writes, "I want to thank Dr. Dean and our other outstanding faculty mentors who have provided students with the opportunity to work on these excellent research projects.…As president of our chapter, I enjoy learning about all the projects fellow students are working on and I am always impressed. My hope for the future is that the projects we are working on will be implemented and help people around the world." 

Chapters may still register for the Design Competition. Visit our website to learn more about requirements and prizes.