Impactful Internships

In the summer of 2023, five Center interns joined us as part of the Institute for Advanced Life Sciences (IALS) Core Summer Internships (CSI) program based in the IALS Core facilities, which seek to advance human health and well-being through the use of translational research. Through the program, interns participated as a cohort in workshops for career-related skills, such as presenting, public speaking, and networking while working in research. With well over a dozen interns on campus, five of them were in our Center doing nurse-engineer research.

The Core Summer Interns we hosted for 2023 were Asmita Deb ’25, a biomedical engineering major, Ruchi Gupta ’24, a finance and computer science major, Jenny Le ’25, a nursing major, Ben Shih ’25, a nursing major, and Alex Xu ’24, a biomedical engineering major.

Interns had assigned research projects for the summer. They worked in the research lab with Dr. Jeannine Blake, RN, and ran trials on the efficacy of Smart IV Pumps under different conditions, using either y-tubing or a Manifold. Their work involved administering mock medication through the IV Pump using the design to determine if the medication output amount was what was needed (or if the pump was behind/ ahead on medication administration). They also used Tobii Pro eye-tracking technology to measure nurses’ error rates and difficulty of the task to program various IV Smart Pumps. Another project was developed with Dr. Frank Sup, with the aim of drafting and creating a design for a cage that could hold a Chest Tube Drainage system.

The impact of the students was felt by the progress and work accomplished, but also by the interns themselves who shared with us what it meant to be part of this research. As intern Shih noted, “To be there for the foundations of these new endeavors was an exciting and unique opportunity. It allowed me to consider the various aspects that go into new ideas and experiments, but also how to approach a complex idea from its most fundamental parts and put it back again without filler and only its necessities.”