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3/15/2007 12:04:00 AM

Editor’s note: This article is the sixth in a series that highlights faculty, staff and students who embody the spirit of Rice’s Vision for the Second Century.

BY LYNETTE MCLAMERY
Special to the Rice News

Vision point: We must provide a holistic undergraduate experience that equips our students with the knowledge, the skills and the values to make a distinctive impact in the world. 

Why limit our sights on helping and learning just in Houston? Why not the world as well?

This is the view of Rice faculty, staff and students involved in Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), a new hands-on learning initiative for students that transcends disciplines and geographic boundaries to develop medical technologies that can help save lives in developing countries, like Botswana and Honduras.

JEFF FITLOW

Bioengineering seniors, from left, Tim Josef, Christina Berry and Mark Mendenhall are working on a prototype for a personal battery-powered, portable refrigeration unit to hold AIDS medications in Botswana.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, chair of the Department of Bioengineering and founder of the program, said BTB provides students with an “impact learning” experience.

“I’ve found that students are very idealistic — they want to make a difference in society,” she said. “Beyond Traditional Borders offers them the opportunity to do something about these issues, not just worry about them. This has been the most rewarding experience in my teaching career.”

Last fall, the four-course BTB undergraduate concentration, made possible with a $2.2 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was launched. It includes a track for engineering and science majors and one for humanities, social science and policy majors.

The plan is to have both engineering and non-engineering majors take a course their freshman year to introduce them to global health issues, split up the majors for the sophomore and junior classes so that each can be assigned hands-on design challenges appropriate for their skill set, and then bring them all back together for a two-semester interdisciplinary capstone design experience. Students may also take global health-related courses other Rice departments offer as electives.

Yvette Mirabal, BTB’s program director, said in each course, students are divided into teams and partner with international health-care groups, who present them with a medical design challenge they face while providing care in developing countries.

In the introductory courses, groups address challenges where an engineering background isn’t essential.

For example, one group is developing resource materials for Baylor College of Medicine’s pediatric AIDS unit in Botswana by developing pictorial dosing guides to ensure that parents and caregivers follow prescribed medication routines for their children with AIDS.

    “In southern Africa, up to 60 percent of deaths in children under 5 can be linked to HIV/AIDS,” Mirabal said. “This percentage can be dramatically reduced if these children receive medication properly. Pictorial materials will make it easy for caregivers to give the right medications in the right dosages.”

In the senior capstone course, the design challenges are more technology-intensive. One group is working on a “lab in a backpack” with Baylor College of Medicine’s Shoulder-to-Shoulder program, where Baylor doctors and medical students travel twice a year to remote regions in Honduras to provide health care.

Another senior design group is working with Baylor College of Medicine’s pediatric AIDS unit in Botswana to develop a prototype for a portable refrigeration unit, nicknamed ICE (inexpensive cooling equipment), that could store a person’s AIDS medications discreetly for months instead of weeks.

“Many AIDS patients may have no power or refrigeration where they live. There’s also a stigma associated with AIDS,” Mirabal said. “The team is considering all of these factors as they develop a refrigeration prototype that is small, portable, energy appropriate and affordable.”

Mark Mendenhall, a senior bioengineering major on the ICE team, said the class has given him the chance to apply what he has learned over the past three years.

“The folks from the pediatric AIDS initiative did not suggest any solutions for the problem and left it to us to figure out the best way to solve this issue of keeping medicine cold away from the clinic,” he said. “In the process we have learned about the business side of product development, from intellectual property to business and marketing strategies.”

Mirabal said that the top design students will have the opportunity to spend eight weeks with their Baylor College of Medicine mentors this summer to test their products in the field and to volunteer in the clinics. Future classes will then refine the prototypes until they are ready for widespread use.

In addition to the undergraduate element, BTB sponsors a one-month summer workshop open to middle school and high school teachers from Houston and abroad, especially those from underserved areas, to implement an elective course on bioengineering and world health that was adapted from a college course that Richards-Kortum has been teaching since 2001.

Richards-Kortum, who still teaches the undergraduate version of the course, said Rice is the only university she is aware of that has a comprehensive program focused on global health technology, which is good for Rice — and for Houston.

“Beyond Traditional Borders is a perfect fit for Rice because we’re located in an international city with a world-renowned medical complex,” she said. “This is just the beginning of what Rice can do to help make Houston the hotbed for global health technology development.”