Rice University bioengineering professors Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden recently won the Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation for their efforts to construct a lower-cost infant breathing apparatus for under-resourced hospitals in the developing world.
But instead of accepting the $100,000 prize money for themselves, they are donating it towards construction of a new neonatal nursery at the African hospital that has helped implement a student-designed health system since 2007. The nursery will improve patient care at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, and support technology innovation through Rice’s Day One Project, an ambitious effort to create a collection of low-cost, neonatal technologies that a district hospital serving 250,000 people can implement for about $5,000.
Oden and Richards-Kortum are two of the driving forces behind the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health Technologies and Rice 360°’s award-winning, hands-on engineering education program Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB). BTB is an engineering-design program founded in 2006 with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. More than 10 percent of Rice undergraduates — including many non-engineering students — have participated in BTB, which has produced 58 low-cost health technologies, including two that are already being broadly distributed by national health authorities in the developing world.
“Each year, more than 3 million babies die within the first month of life,” Oden said. “Ninety-nine percent of those deaths happen in the developing world, and many of them could be prevented if hospitals in low-income countries had access to a few low-cost technologies that combat the most common causes of infant mortality.”
Oden and Richards-Kortum said the new QECH nursery will provide excellent care for newborns and serve as an innovation hub for the design, evaluation and implementation of Rice 360°’s Day One Project, an ambitious $375,000 effort to improve the lives of newborns in the developing world from the day they are born. Through the Day One Project, Rice 360° aims to create a collection of low-cost, neonatal technologies that a district hospital serving 250,000 people can implement for about $5,000.
“Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden have applied outstanding research and motivated our innovative students to use simple technology to improve health care in the world’s poorest regions,” said Rice President David Leebron. “As teachers, they have challenged their students to become leaders who use their skills in the service of others and betterment of our world, in this case saving babies’ lives, and that is a fundamental part of Rice’s mission.”
Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of Rice’s Department of Bioengineering, also directs Rice 360°. Oden, professor in the practice of bioengineering and director of Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, coordinates the technical design efforts of BTB students.
BTB students work in teams to design technologies that address health care challenges identified by clinicians in the developing world. Each summer, about a dozen Rice students take the year’s most promising BTB designs to Africa and Latin America for evaluation under the guidance of physicians and nurses in clinics and hospitals. More than 90 percent of BTB summer interns plan to incorporate global health activities into their careers after graduation.
The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding innovators and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention. The program recognized Richards-Kortum and Oden for several BTB technologies, including Rice’s “bubble CPAP” system, or bCPAP, a respiratory support system for newborns that uses low-cost aquarium pumps to generate “continuous positive airway pressure” (CPAP).