As a member of the class of 2023, biomedical engineering major and Grand Challenges Scholar Elizabeth Staten’s college experience was heavily influenced by the pandemic. Her plans for summer internships and studying abroad had to be reconfigured, resulting in one busy summer as she entered her senior year.
About a week after finals, Elizabeth began a virtual, collaborative project with students from Lebanon to learn about global health systems and fulfill the Grand Challenges Scholars program requirement to undertake an educational component with global reach. After receiving a crash course on medical supply chains, international differences between health systems, and their cultural contexts, the participants were challenged to collaborate in small groups to propose and explore a solution to a problem they learned about. Elizabeth shared with her team something she learned in BE 439: Medical Equipment Management – that US hospitals often store medical devices that are going underused or unused. Her team decided to explore the idea of creating an app that would make it easier for hospitals to communicate with one another across international borders about equipment that is unneeded at one hospital and needed at another. Anticipating an issue with differing levels of operational expertise from place to place, the team decided that instructions for use should be included in the app, as well as information about resources for device repair. The team encountered some challenges working together from two sides of an ocean, mostly related to working around time differences; however, Elizabeth appreciated the opportunity to learn about another culture within the context of her interest in healthcare.
With the rest of her summer, like most undergraduate engineering students at Catholic University, Elizabeth deepened her biomedical engineering education and beefed up her resume with an internship. Elizabeth felt some pressure to secure an internship this summer, so she cast a wide net, applying to internships even if she wasn’t sure she was the perfect fit. Once she found the biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca’s internship listings, she applied to almost twenty positions within that company alone. Initially, drawn to the company because of its size, Elizabeth found that her application strategy paid off there – she excelled in her work at the Gaithersburg, Maryland lab despite realizing that the job was more related to chemical engineering than biomedical engineering. She enjoyed seeing how her daily hands-on lab work testing the feasibility of proposals to reduce water usage in protein purification made progress toward larger goals of sustainability. Ultimately, however, the experience confirmed for Elizabeth that her interests lie less in biopharmaceuticals and much more in device design and bioprinting, making her all the more excited for her senior design project this year working with Dr. Chris Raub on photobiofabrication and a three-dimensional bioprinting platform.