STUDENT NEWS
Student society earns national honor
In October, our student chapter of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) will receive the 2008 Chapter Meritorious Achievement Award from the national BMES organization. The award is the highest a chapter can win. The students’ congratulatory letter states: “Your chapter is a model from which we hope many other chapters across the nation can learn.” In its 10-year history, this year marks the fifth time the chapter has received the award.
BMES students head to Florida to build houses for Habitat for Humanity
For a week of their winter break, 25 members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) built houses for Habitat for Humanity in Florida.
The group set off on Jan. 12 for Jacksonville, the largest U.S. Habitat for Humanity affiliate with more than 1,500 homes built since the 1980s. This is the third time the UW-Madison BMES students have worked with Habitat for Humanity and their second trip to Florida.
“It was eye opening to see what it takes to build a house,” says Cali Roen, BMES outreach chair. “It was a lot of hammer and nail work, which is really fun.”
BMES members worked on multiple houses; their tasks ranged from putting up frames and adding windows to painting and laying sod in the yards. AmeriCorps volunteers directed the students, who enjoyed getting to know others dedicated to public service.
They also had other important co-workers: the future owners of the houses they worked on. Habitat for Humanity requires the homeowners to put in “sweat hours” as payment, and Roen says she was glad to meet the people who would occupy the houses. “It was good to learn how to communicate with people not from the same background as you,” she says.
Though the students were up at 6 a.m. to put in a full day at the houses, the trip wasn’t all work: They spent time at the beach—despite chilly temperatures. “We were the crazy Wisconsinites actually out in water on the coldest day of the week,” says Ben Engel, BMES social chair.
Last year, seven students participated in the Habitat for Humanity project, and their positive experience encouraged more students this year. “Everyone said Habitat is awesome, it’s a fantastic experience,” says Roen, who was a first-timer this year.
The trip was a good bonding experience for the students, many of whom are officers in BMES. “When you spend 18 hours in a car with someone, you get to know things about them,” says Engel.
The group stayed at the Riverside Presbyterian Church; after “work,” many members often played soccer and card games late into the night.
Overall, the biggest takeaway from the trip was experience in leadership, says Roen, who is a new BMES officer this semester. “It’s another way to get a lot more in depth with BMES,” she says.
Team places at national competition
At the 2007-08 Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Accessible Medical Instrumentation Senior Design Competition, undergrads Arin Ellingson, Marty Grasse, Jon Sass, Ben Schoepke and David Schurter took second place in the “Accessible incontinence control device” category with their project of the same name. Twenty teams from 15 universities entered; judges from government, industry and academia evaluated the entries. Senior Lecturer Mitch Tyler was the team advisor. Learn more about the project at https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/bschoepke/web/incontinence/index.html.
Bergh dedicated to BME outreach
“I have always been one of those people who really like to help other people,” says senior Samantha Bergh. “I think it’s much more interesting than doing engineering by itself.”
Outgoing and approachable, Bergh channels her desire to help people via a suite of hands-on outreach presentations she created to teach young students—and their teachers—about biomedical engineering. Since she began as a UW-Madison student four years ago, she has coordinated and delivered presentations to nearly 20 groups.
Sometimes she works solo, but often she enlists the help of volunteers like PhD student Amit Nimunkar or Professor Willis Tompkins. They might demonstrate biomedical instrumentation, discuss how the heart works, or talk about who designs such medical devices as x-ray machines or ear thermometers. “It’s relating engineering to kids and things that they come in contact with,” says Bergh.
As much as they talk, Bergh and her volunteers also listen. “How does this work?” young students ask. “What is that for? Why is that happening? What are you going to do when you graduate?” (Bergh, who is interested in how the heart works, would like to work on pacemakers and currently is on co-op at medical-device company St. Jude Medical. “I’m working on catheters that go up into the heart to correct arrhythmias,” she says.)
When she’s on campus, Bergh works in the Engineering General Resources (EGR) Office and often gives prospective students tours of the College of Engineering. “I think it’s cool and I like talking to people,” she says.
As a result of her tour experience, when Assistant Dean and EGR head Don Woolston learns of a group that’s in need of an outreach presentation, Bergh is among the people he contacts.
As they enter a campus bioinstrumentation laboratory loaded with medical instruments, middle-schoolers often seem a bit nervous, says Bergh. But after working in groups of three or four with Bergh and her classmates, the younger students gain confidence. “By the end, they’re all kind of excited, asking more questions and feeling more comfortable with the smaller-group interaction,” she says. “I’ve gotten E-mails and letters from chaperones and students alike, thanking me and telling me that they’re interested and realize that engineering is something they could do in the future.”
