Engaging engineering students to invent solutions to global health challenges and cultivating invention education at African universities
Rice 360° Institute for Global Health is a program at Rice University designed to prepare students to lead tomorrow’s global health workforce. It offers innovative undergraduate programs that engage students to design and implement new technologies to solve real global health challenges. Students have the ability to declare a minor, participate in internships and fellowships or enter Ph.D. programs, through which these early-stage technologies are designed, evaluated, refined, deployed and scaled across the world.
The program began through a partnership between Rice University and the University of Malawi College of Medicine and Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.
Rice 360° received an initial grant from Foundation grantee VentureWell to incorporate design-based engineering education into the undergraduate experience, which led to the development of its first prototype.
Rice 360° has received support from diverse funders in addition to the Foundation, including a Saving Lives at Birth grant from USAID, a Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation and the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition.
Its programs include:
NEST360°:
The Newborn Essential Solutions & Technologies program (NEST 360) has the goal to halve newborn mortality in Africa by 2030. It is a package of 17 low-cost, rugged and sustainable technologies to treat the leading causes of newborn death in Africa.
The program also addresses implementation and distribution at scale, with an initial launch planned in eight African countries, including Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Uganda.
Example devices include:
Pumani – a bubble CPAP for assisted breathing device for newborns experiencing Respiratory Distress Syndrome
BiliSpec – a battery-powered reader to detect newborn jaundice from a drop of blood
Kasupe – a syringe pump for IV drug infusion for mothers experiencing preeclampsia
BreathAlert – a continuous breathing monitor to address apnea in premature newborns
Invention Education at African Universities:
Supported by the Foundation, Rice 360° collaborates with partners in Malawi and Tanzania to strengthen the capacity for local invention and entrepreneurship focused on improving health in sub-Saharan Africa.
In its first three years, the program reached over 1200 students and 50 faculty members in Malawi and translated nine new technologies from prototypes to initial clinical evaluation at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital.
Working with the Malawi Polytechnic University, University of Malawi School of Medicine, Malawi University of Science and Technology, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and Ifakara Health Institute, Rice 360° will disseminate its successful model of invention education to reach thousands of students in sub-Saharan Africa and create a model for further expansion in Africa.