Remote Summer Institute

 

In the summer of 2020, Engineering World Health offered a new, free virtual Summer Institute program that brought together groups of students from the U.S., Scandinavia, and Nepal. The course focused on low-resource design and engineering for healthcare in an international setting. Participants worked in international teams.

The program is supported by a generous donor who has long supported our work in Nepal, Flemming Topsøe.

Students from the Nordic 5 Tech Alliance and Nepal had the opportunity to work and learn together remotely throughout this course. Material was taught by Professor Deborah Walter of the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology. The course covered concepts for biomedical design, collaboration, ethics, and entrepreneurship as these topics relate to engineering for low-resource environments. Students worked independently through self-directed learning modules as well as collaborated virtually in groups to further develop design ideas and exchange knowledge. Teams were also assigned a program mentor from Denmark, Nepal, or the U.S. with significant engineering background and experience in low-resource hospitals to help them throughout this process.

You can see each team's final presentation here.

The final program report is here.

Dates: The course ran on a six week timeline, starting July 13 and ending August 21.

Students can expect to spend 2-4 hours per week on independent work and should plan to virtually meet with their groups twice per week throughout the program.

Criteria: Participants must be a student or recent graduate of a university in Nepal or one of the Nordic 5 Tech Alliance universities.

At the end of the course, students will receive a certificate of completion. On request, EWH will gladly provide summary materials to present to your home university in support of any independent study credit you may seek.

Sign-ups are now closed. Thank you everyone for your enthusiastic response to this program! Check out the design teams' final projects here.