Kerry Eller is a Bioengineering student at Northeastern University. Eller was posted at St. Paul’s Hospital and Medical College in Ethiopia’s capital. She along with some other fellows were charged with repairing broken medical devices. However, much of the non-functional equipment were donated by overseas organisations and had either arrived without critical parts or were incompatible with the hospital’s infrastructure. Eller believed that we knew that they needed a way to reinvent them instead of trying to fix them.
Eller and a team of students developed surveys to assess what St. Paul’s needed. It also sought to evaluate the expertise of technicians in the bioengineering department at St. Paul’s Millennium Medical College. The goal was to support the Ethiopians in creating devices using the resources they already had available to them. It highlighted the absence of innovation training. They spent the remaining trip teaching technicians, technical students, and engineers about an open-source electronics platform. The next year, 2019, Eller traveled to Santiago, Chile, where she spent six months working on the prototype for a mosquito trap. Here, she began developing a low-cost wearable pesticide monitor for agricultural workers. She looks forward to continuing the project once the COVID-19 pandemic ends.
Recently, Eller has been awarded a Truman Scholarship, a premier fellowship in the United States for those pursuing careers as public service leaders. It recognises exemplary academic abilities and demonstrated leadership and the drive to serve the public. It provides funding for graduate study, mentoring, and connection to a national network of public service leaders. With this scholarship, she will pay for a doctoral degree in bioengineering. She would like to spend a year working in a community alongside researchers to develop a medical device that could help improve access to healthcare for the community’s residents. In the future, she would like to work with nonprofit organisations to develop medical technologies for low- and middle-income communities.
“If I want to make a difference. I have to know that change is possible”, says Eller.
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman