On a hot July day in Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative, a group of undergraduate students gathered to show off their work on everything from an artificial hand developed to help a boy play basketball to a device designed to automatically test wastewater in Nigeria for signs of COVID-19.

Rice University’s Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies and Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) this summer merged two internship programs and brought together 17 students over the course of seven weeks to employ inventive engineering design methods tackling health technology challenges. The Summer Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) and Rice360 interns recently showcased their work among classmates and program sponsors.

“The goal of this internship is twofold,” said Ashley Taylor, Rice360’s director of education. “We deeply believe and have witnessed that students can create real-world impacts with their innovations. The summer internship allows us to do that in a really powerful way with a full-time focus on projects.”

“The second and maybe even bigger goal is to empower students to identify problems in their communities and to cultivate a skill set to derive solutions for those problems,” she continued. “In the long term, it is not just an investment in the projects we are working on now but also an investment in their ability to face future complexities.”

Divided into five groups, the students represented academic majors ranging from social policy analysis to health sciences. But the interdisciplinary teams remained united by the program’s goal.

To pick the projects for this summer’s program, OEDK, Rice360 and industry partners looked through a pool of proposals and developed a one-page sketch of each entry. From there, the interns scoped the assignments based on their skill sets, interests and the timeline of the program. Three design mentors, who were part of the program’s 2021 summer cohort, coached the teams and provided guidance throughout the term.

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