Through hands-on activities, Rice 360°'s educational programs, like the Beyond Traditional Borders initiative, engage undergraduates directly in solving global health challenges. Rice 360° empowers students to put their ideas into action, training them to lead efforts to prevent disease, improve health, and reduce poverty in poor communities throughout the world.
Global Health Technologies Minor
In Beyond Traditional Borders, students from all academic disciplines work together to design solutions to challenges faced by healthcare providers in poor settings. Through international internships, students spend eight weeks testing and refining their solutions in the settings for which the solutions were designed. To date, students have worked in six countries, and their designs have touched the lives of over 6,500 people.
Master's Degree in Development Practice
Rice 360° is working to establish a professional master's degree to train a new generation of leaders in international development who can design and implement sustainable, integrated solutions to poor health and poverty. Students in the program will build on the foundations of science, engineering, health, and entrepreneurship to solve real challenges. During two summer field experiences, students will implement and scale up solutions they have designed in communities around the world. Curricular materials for the program will be shared through Connexions, Rice's online open-source educational platform.
Student-Designed Health TechnologiesDiagnostic Lab in a Backpack | |
The Lab-in-a-Backpack contains tools to help healthcare practitioners working in remote regions diagnose health issues. The backpack is customized for use in Honduras, Guatemala, Malawi, Lesotho, Tanzania, and Botswana. It has improved care for nearly 3,300 patients. Learn more. Food Distribution System In partnership with local volunteers, Rice students created a system to determine eligibility, register participants, and distribute food from the World Food Programme to patients at the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative Children's Center of Excellence in Mbabane, Swaziland. | 
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| Low-Cost Incubator and Phototherapy Lights | |
The incubator and phototherapy light can be used to treat babies who are premature or have neonatal jaundice. Based on the Blantyre Hot Cot, a design used in Malawi, the incubator and phototherapy lights are made with wood, light-bulbs, Plexiglass and LEDs. Last summer, Rice interns taught high school students in Lesotho to build the incubators in the school's woodshop. They were delivered to three hospitals,becoming the first incubator in each setting. Learn More. |  |
| Community Assessment | |
Through house-to-house visits and written surveys, a team of Rice students worked with leaders in three communities in Lesotho to assess community need and implement interventions that promote better health and sustainable environmental practices. Interventions included fuel-efficient stoves and keyhole gardens, which allow families to grow vegetables in poor soil. Students visited more than 100 homes and administered nearly 300 surveys |  |
Student-Designed Educational Programs | |
| Health, Clean Water, and Hygiene | |
Using an "organ shirt" to teach anatomy, a song to teach hand-washing, and a microscope to view the microbes in contaminated water. Rice undergraduates taught health, clean water, and hygiene to primary students in Terrier Rouge, Haiti. The class reached 450 students, and interns worked with teachers to include hygiene and clean water education in their curriculum. Learn more. |  |
| HIV/AIDS Prevention | |
With skits, games, and other activities they had designed, undergraduates taught children from the SOS Village orphange in Maseru, Lesotho, about HIV/AIDS prevention, the immune system, and other important biological concepts. Student scores on a test assessing their knowledge about HIV/AIDS rose from 49% to 70% as a result of the class. Learn more. | .jpg) |
| Microenterprise | |
In a month-long workshop at Masianokeng High School in Lesotho, Rice undergraduates taught secondary students basic business and financial skills. Students developed individual business plans and a cooperative business. The cooperative business, a school store, is managed and staffed by students, and it has begun to save its profits in a local bank. A portion of the profits are designated for a scholarship fund, to pay school fees for students who cannot afford them. Learn more. | .JPG) |
Bioengineering and World Health Using hands-on activities and field trips, Rice students held a month-long winter camp in Lesotho to teach secondary students about how technology can be used to improve health, how to stay healthy, and how to prevent serious diseases like HIV/AIDS, diabetes, and cardiac disease. Learn More |  |
| Medicine Dosing Device | |
Pediatric HIV/AIDS patients in Africa are treated with liquid anti-retroviral medications (ARVs) that are dosed based on the patient’s weight and measured via a syringe. Many children are being cared for by elderly grandparents who may lack the dexterity, eyesight, and literacy to administer the correct dosing consistently. To address this issue, bioengineering students designed the Medicine Dosing Device, a pump that can fit on most medication bottles and can be set to deliver a specific amount of medication. Learn More. |  |
Pictorial Dosing Guide Treatment regimens for HIV are complex and demanding, especially for children. The design team created a Pictorial Dosing Guide (PDG) which provides caretakers of HIV-positive children with an image-based drug regimen guide. Learn More. |  |
| Adherence Monitoring System | |
The current treatment for HIV/AIDS, anti-Retroviral medication, requires at least 95% adherence to be effective in delaying the progression of the virus. At the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative Centers of Excellence (BIPAI COE) clinicians measure adherence by manually counting the medication. To develop a more time-efficient process, the design team created a device that incorporates two scales and a pocket PC that can calculate adherence based on the weight of the medication. Learn More. |  |
Creating Global Leaders to Improve Health and Reduce Poverty
Students in Beyond Traditional Borders learn skills through their internships that they can carry forward in their careers, becoming leaders in technology, engineering, healthcare, or any field they choose.
Learn more about where Rice 360º Global Leaders are now...
Beyond Traditional Borders