Week 1: Introductions and Initial Thoughts

Hello! My name is Kayla McMillan and I am a first year bioengineering student working on the malnutrition project with Professor Lori Herz. I have been on this project since the initial take off in fall semester 2018.

A little background information you should know about me is that I have been in martial arts since I was seven years old. I received my fourth degree black belt in kenpo as well as my first degree black belt in jujitsu. Through karate, I was also given the opportunity to be able to teach students from the ages three to fifteen years old. Throughout this experience, I developed a passion for working with children.

Another passion of mine is research and one of the mothers at karate worked at Duke’s Medical Research Center. She offered me a summer internship at her lab over the past summer and I eagerly accepted the position. I spent the whole summer in the neurosurgery department looking at glioblastoma cells and trying to track their activation pathways.

These two very crucial experiences in my life had allowed me to draw the conclusion that I wanted to go into researching adversities children face on a day to day basis. Ideally, I want to find solutions to such issues and find ways to ensure that children all over the world are able to live long, healthy, and happy lives regardless of their immediate and surrounding circumstances. Knowing this as I was heading into my first semester at Lehigh, I knew I wanted to find something on campus that would allow me to do so. Quickly after classes began, I received an email from the bioengineering department with a summary of a new research project headed by Professor Herz. After reading the email, I immediately knew I had to get involved. It was the perfect opportunity for me; it involved researching malnutrition in children and finding solutions for them. I applied for the position and when I heard back from Lori inviting me into the project, I was ecstatic and have loved every moment working on the project since.

I believe that this project has the potential to help me develop skillsets that will set me apart in the work field as well as give me a more direct insight into potential bioengineering career paths. What I love about this project is that it truly is what you make of it. Yes, there are deadlines, expectations, and specific requirements we need to accomplish, but it is up to the team to actually get things done and if we fail, we lost the opportunity to continue working on the project. Which I think is an excellent simulation of the real world.

Additionally, as a Global Social Impact Fellow, we are expected to know how to fail and how to turn a great idea into a possible solution. This course teaches us how to think outside the box and the mindset we need to have in order to maximize the efficiency and success of our product. Having the ability to not only think of solutions to pressing issues, but also being able to move them away from just an idealized state into a concrete plan will definitely set me apart in the work force and in school. Lots of people can come up with brilliant ideas, hundreds of thousands of them are being created every day, but not everyone has the passion, motivation, knowledge, and/or mindset to actually turn them into a reality.

We were tasked with finding a solution to the lack of proper eyewear in Kenya to improve productivity among workers. The solution would obviously have to be cost effective, easily accessible, actually work, have the potential to be easily massed produced, look aesthetically pleasing, be sustainable, and obviously can’t be harmful towards the customers or the local Kenya economy. All of these, and more, need to be considered during the brainstorming process. My proposed solution would be to finding a way to utilize their natural resources to fashion some sort of glasses frame, but with the lenses, instead of needing to get eyesight tests and paying for the specified glass lenses, finding a way to use water droplets. I know that when water is curved in a certain manner, it can act as a magnifying glass and can actually help improve eye sight and sharpness of vision. With this in mind, I clearly don’t have a full fledged business plan, but off the top of my head I would want to create a type of glasses that you insert a water droplet and just alter the curvature of the frame the water goes into to increase eyesight. Obviously there would be a lot of things to consider if actually going to implement this plan and a lot of kinks to work out, but I think it would be a great way to utilize the resources that they have immediate access to in Kenya without being too strenuous financially on the customers.

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