Integrative Graduate
Education and
Research Traineeship

Highlight

Engineering World Health at UCI club founded with the help of NSF funded IGERT-LifeChips trainees

Engineering World Health at UCI officers

Projects:

IGERT: Life Chip

Institution:

University of California at Irvine

Primary Strategic Goal:

Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Secondary Strategic Goal:

Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.

Achievement/Results

NSF funded IGERT-LifeChips fellow, Meghan Cozzens, was one of the founding members of the student club Engineering World Health at UCI. This club is connected with the national Engineering World Health (EWH) organization started at Duke University. EWH at UCI is an interdisciplinary campus organization with health care projects that unite engineering, science, economics, public health, communications, statistics, education, and other fields. The clubs mission is to mobilize the UCI community to improve the quality of health care in vulnerable communities of the developing world. The club is open to anyone looking to contribute to the cause. Meghan was inspired to start the club after she heard about a graduate student who took a trip to Tanzania to fix medical equipment. Through IGERT-LifeChips funding, Meghan has had the opportunity to expand her educational knowledge and training beyond her chemical and biomedical engineering background into other areas including statistics, molecular biology, and public health. Meghan has also volunteered at the UCI Medical Center to further her understanding of the interaction between engineering and medicine.

The knowledge obtained through her volunteer experience and IGERT-LifeChips interdisciplinary coursework made Meghan even more convinced that there needed to be an Engineering World Health club on the campus of UCI. For the past academic year, Meghan and her colleague, NSF funded IGERT-LifeChips fellow Melinda Simon, have also mentored six undergraduate students in their Engineering World Health senior design projects. The Biomedical Engineering Department has consistently reported that their six mentees are performing among the top of their class in project accomplishments and presentations. The biomedical engineering faculty has also expressed their interest in getting more involved with Engineering World Health at UCI. Next year, the club hopes to coordinate with various faculty members to develop a course outlining some emerging principles and guidelines for humanitarian engineering projects based on the history of successes and failures these projects have experienced over the past century.

Address Goals

The establishment of the Engineering World Health club at UCI addresses the NSF goal of learning by providing an environment that promotes interdisciplinary collaboration to help solve health care issues around the world. This highlight also address the NSF goal of discovery in that the EWH at UCI club is working to develop a course that will educate students about emerging principles and guidelines for humanitarian engineering projects and motivate them to conduct research in that area.