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Cardboard Incubators, Painless Diagnostics and Make Your Own Medicine!
Disruptive Innovation for Low Cost Healthcare
Speakers
Health care costs are an enormous burden on the economy. In addition, this lack of affordability and access is creating social fractures with increasing health-care access divisions in society. This session will describe emerging technologies that are designed to empower people to take charge of their own health.
The question our speaker poses is, how can technology be leveraged to empower people? A fascinating project that Dr. Rao have been privileged to work on is to develop the ability to manufacture medicines on demand- this was featured in Nature recently. The talk describes the fascinating background that led to this technology – how a US military doctor grew frustrated at his inability to get medicine in Afghanistan and created this technology.
Dr. Rao will then talk about his own experience in developing a simple cardboard incubator to tackle the problems of infant mortality and malnutrition. Such simple innovations can potentially make life-saving interventions available at very low cost – a kind of medicine on demand.
Read more here.
*Please note: BIC Venue events need attendees to be double vaccinated and comply with all health and safety protocols
Speakers
Govind Rao
Govind Rao is Professor of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1984. His Ph.D. degree was obtained from Drexel University in Chemical Engineering in 1987. He has been a faculty member at UMBC since 1987 and has served as Department Chair from 2000-2006. In 2006, he founded the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST) and has been serving as its Director since its inception.
Dr. Rao’s research is targeted towards disruptive innovation, where the goal is to create paradigm shifts in the state-of-the-art. A major effort is the application of sensor technology to reduce healthcare costs and close disparity gaps by making innovative low-cost devices for use in low-resource settings. Another emerging area is point-of-care biomanufacturing. He has published nearly 200 papers in professional journals. His funding has come from several diverse sources including NSF, NIH, JDRF, DARPA, FDA, ONR, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and from several companies. Dr. Rao has given several invited Keynote and Plenary Lectures at various International Conferences and Corporations. He has served on various government and industry advisory panels.
He has received several awards. These include the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, Outstanding Teaching and Research Awards from UMBC, the Van Lanen Award from the American Chemical Society, the Gaden Award from Biotechnology & Bioengineering, the University System of Maryland Regents Award for Excellence in Research and he has been named a 2003 Innovator of the Year by the Maryland Daily Record. Dr. Rao has several issued patents, many of which have been licensed. Dr. Rao has served as the Chair of the Biotechnology Division of the American Chemical Society and on the Editorial Board of several prominent journals. In 2007, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, he was appointed as Editor of the PDA Journal of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology. In 2015, he was named an Eminent Engineer by Tau Beta Pi In 2019 he received a “75 bright ideas” award from UMBC for the number of inventions filed. He received the 2017 Pioneer Award from Connected World Magazine. The cardboard incubator won the 2019 Academic Pediatric Association Global Health Research Award. He has been named 2019 Presidential Research Professor at UMBC. He has been appointed as an American Chemical Society Media Expert in 2022.
