Biomedical Engineering Seniors Travel Overseas for Firsthand Experience

Twelve senior biomedical engineering students got the experience of a lifetime this past spring when they were selected for international expeditions that provided a firsthand understanding of medical care delivery in remote or third-world environments.

A six-person team traveled to Lanzhou, China, to work with the families of underprivileged pediatric patients who were in need of heart surgery. A two-person team visited HIV/STD patients at clinics serving the gay/transgender sex worker population in Lima, Peru. And a four-person team journeyed to the Thailand-Myanmar border to witness the frontline of the malaria battleground.

The overseas trips, funded by a $25,000 gift from Edwards Lifesciences, were part of a larger effort to enhance the senior capstone design course. With many biomedical companies in its neighborhood, the Samueli School receives significant feedback from industry partners about its graduates.

“Industry folks were telling us that our students were good on theory and technical expertise but needed more hands on experience and people skills,” says William Tang, professor of biomedical engineering and associate dean for research, who led the effort to implement new ideas to the design course in response to industry representatives’ comments. Specifically, Tang incorporated leadership, teamwork and communications training into the design course, as well as increased the number of industry-mentored projects for students.

The international trips were an opportunity for the selected students to put their teamwork and leadership skills to the test, providing genuine care and help to people in disparate need. The department partnered with UC Irvine’s Public Health Program for the trips to Peru and Thailand, and with Angel Heart International for the trip to China.

BME student Reaz Rahman went on the Thailand-Myanmar trip to study malaria. His senior project was a portable and low-cost malaria diagnostic platform that proposes diagnosing malaria with a saliva sample instead of blood from a finger prick.

“The experience I gained from doing field research on malaria is unlike any education I have ever received before,” says Rahman. “It was something I could never have learned from a book. Seeing the diagnostic process helped me to understand the need for better and more advanced diagnostics that would improve lives.”

I was extremely excited with the outcomes from these expeditions,” says Tang, who accompanied the teams going to China and Thailand. “Even though traveling to these areas was strenuous and taxing, even a hardship for some, in the end, all the students came back transformed in their ideas about biomedical engineering. They were fired up and excited about continuing on in this line of profession, almost as a life calling or mission.”