Caring for my grandmother gave me an appreciation of the difficulty of caring for a patient with communication challenges and limited mobility. Witnessing her experience is what sparked my interest in engineering solutions within medicine. At Hopkins, I was a part of three different biomedical engineering design teams, where I worked with a team of college students and a clinical mentor to design and test out solutions to a problem within medicine. These three projects helped solidify my interest in applying engineering within medicine.
The summer after my junior year of college, I joined Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Department of Pediatric Nephrology as an undergraduate intern. Pediatric nephrology is the area of medicine where doctors treat patients that are kids with kidney problems. Kidneys are organs whose main function is to filter waste out of your blood. Through this experience, I got to interact with patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and learn about how factors such as parental income, English proficiency and the number of active caretakers a child has can affect the quality of healthcare a child receives. CKD is a long-term condition where your kidneys do not filter waste out of your blood properly. This experience inspired me to pursue research that applies my background in biomedical engineering to address health inequities faced by patients with CKD.
There are many reasons why I chose to pursue research in India. Firstly, there are around 1400 people in India per doctor. The severe shortage of doctors in India leads many patients to not receive life saving healthcare as early as they should.
