This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The SMP Program in Engineering with a Certificate in Global Health Technologies is training engineering students at Northwestern University to design medical devices for underserved populations throughout the world, including poor communities in the United States. Students completing this program graduate with an MS in either Biomedical Engineering or Environmental Engineering with additional training in product design, regulatory issues, intellectual property, and the commercialization process. Each student enrolled in the program will work in multidisciplinary teams under the direct on-site supervision of a faculty member and one of the program's industry or university partners. Graduates of this program are qualified to work in the medical device industry and related jobs in government, and are exceptionally qualified to join nonprofits and global NGOs that serve resource-poor sectors of the domestic or international society.
The US Department of Labor predicts that the next decade will see jobs for biomedical and environmental engineers increase by over 70% and 30% respectively, but cautions that many of these jobs will require graduate degrees. Health is and will remain one of the nation's largest economic sectors and the problems of global and environmental health are among the greatest challenges facing this generation of engineers, scientists, and technology managers. This SMP initiative is designed to draw highly qualified US students into a rigorous and hands-on engineering-focused training program that addresses these challenges though innovation and design.
This grant provided support for 18 Global and Ecological Health Engineering (GEHE) students for their studies and summer internships. In addition eight additional students were enrolled without support. Approximately half of the students provided technical support to the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India and half travelled to Southern Africa, primarily through our program in Cape Town South Africa In Rajasthan (Jaipur and Jodhpur) the students participate in projects where they evaluated the water resource crisis in the region and proposed plans for watershed management and testing, building on the studies of the previous students. The Cape Town students were working on projects to improve health care in Cape Town, South Africa and the surrounding regions For MS students in biomedical or environmental engineering, CIGHT offers the Certificate in Global and Ecological Health Engineering. Designed for students who plan to work in positions outside of the United States or beyond the traditional borders of industry, the Certificate in Global and Ecological Health Engineering provides students with focused training in context-sensitive biomedical and environmental engineering design. Projects in Cape Town included work in the following areas; diagnostics for the developing world context, appropriate and sustainable healthcare technologies. Overview of the program Students pursuing the Certificate in Global and Ecological Health Engineering take four courses in addition to the courses required for an engineering MS degree. Over the course of the four quarters of coursework (not including summer) students typically take one course to be each quarter (in conjunction with standard biomedical or environmental engineering coursework). In addition there is a summer research project in a resource poor sitting or in a laboratory where the research is related to healthcare technologies for resource-poor settings. Project teams include environmental engineering students working from a public health perspective (primarily water resources) and biomedical engineering students working from a medical device design and process-design perspective.
