I enrolled in this course/applied for these fellowships because it seemed like it was an excellent way to combine a few things that I care about. My two main focuses over the past few years is to set myself up for a career that can use science to help others. These projects and the impact that they seek to have do exactly that. I am interested in medicine and biology which makes me a very good fit for the SicklED project that allows my background knowledge in these fields to have value. This project was also a good fit for me because I have a minor in Maternal and Child Population Health and SicklED is hoping to improve early diagnosis of sickle cell anemia and change the child mortality rate for the better. This along with the impact on a large scale in another county (and hopefully this becomes countries eventually) made this an easy choice. Along with these reasons I am seeking a future in the medical field and feel that this experience and involvement with this project may help to set me apart in applications. However, this is dependent on our success, so the first and only focus now is to further the venture.
I think that as a student of biology and hopefully medicine I need a few things to be successful. The first of which is an understanding of how biological systems function. Much of this will be learned through coursework in my major. Another piece would be understanding how biology can be used to help people or improve their lives/health outcomes. I believe this course may help more in this area. Some of the topics that we plan to cover are ethics, culture, research, and health care systems. All of which can help me to use biology to help others more effectively than I could have before. Education in ethics allows for potentially less harm to be done while attempting to further or current or future ventures. This is a potential because ethics studies moral principles and frequently how actions can or cannot be justified. Learning more about research techniques could improve my effectiveness of doing work with biology by improving technique, efficiency, or quality or results. Finally, furthering my knowledge of health care systems, specifically in Sierra Leone, can give me a new perspective on how vastly different places view and treat healthcare. Additionally, my project SicklED is focused on this country and knowledge of it could help me become a better biology student for the very specific venture that I am currently involved in.
This issue of eyeglasses access is quite complex and would likely need many steps to reach a full solution. I think a few main areas that could really make a difference if addressed are diagnosis and distribution. I believe that diagnosis would be the more difficult of the two due to needing potentially a skilled/trained workforce to prescribe the correct glasses or a way to digitally assign people properly prescribed eyeglasses. In order to make a significant impact, the better strategy would be to design a system on a computer that can determine someone’s eyeglasses prescription accurately. An additional bonus would be to have it work effectively without an internet connection. With something like this in place it become possible to begin to remedy the unmet need for eyeglasses. This however creates an issue with distributing a tablet or similar device that would house the diagnosing program. The cost could be kept low by having a very large number of people using the same device and a large company like amazon working to distribute said tablet. Cost for tablets, especially those that are not name brand, has been declining recently and a tablet that could have this functionality is likely going to cost less than $100.00 a piece. This of course adds up as the scale of the project would increase. The issue of distributing the actual eyeglasses could be made cheaper by entire towns/villages completing the prescription program and ordering all the glasses together in a bulk order, rather than individually. A local hospital or similar community structure could house the tablet and function as the place where diagnosis, ordering, delivery, and distribution of eyeglasses could occur. This makes it less personal and structures like hospitals are frequently more accessible to the general population.