Teacher from Malawi learns about global health at Rice

A teacher trainer from the African country Malawi has spent the past month at Rice University learning about bioengineering and global health so she can educate high school teachers in her homeland about new treatments for and ways to prevent AIDS, cancer and heart disease.

Panji Chamdimba was one of 12 teachers who enrolled in the teacher professional development workshop on bioengineering and world health in June. The workshop, offered through the Department of Bioengineering's Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), is taught by a multidisciplinary team of Rice experts and guest lecturers.

Participants attended clinical rotations at hospitals in the Texas Medical Center and visited bioengineering labs at Rice to see research in action.

"This workshop describes how multidisciplinary bioengineering is," said Emma Johns '07, program assistant. "The field requires the coordination and integration of everything from nanotechnology and optical imaging techniques to surgical procedures and biochemistry, and these technologies have to be applied to the social and cultural context in which they will be used."

The latter was particularly appealing to Chamdimba.

"It is interesting to learn about the about the technologies available to cure or reduce the burden of diseases like malaria, AIDS, cancer and heart disease," she said, "But when you are fighting a disease, it is not only the science that is important, but also the social aspects."

Chamdimba was encouraged to see that bioengineers think about how their research will work in parts of the world that do not have all the modern conveniences of developed countries. "You can develop a very good technology, but you have to consider the people who are intended to benefit from the research and what their lives are like so they will actually use what you develop."

The workshop covers the health problems faced by different age groups in both the developed and developing world, global health challenges, the cost of health care and the development of technology to solve health-care problems.

Chamdimba found out about the course through a colleague who knows Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering. Richards-Kortum is principal investigator for Rice's BTB Initiative, which is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"The immediate plans are for me to teach what I've learned here to my student teachers as well as to science teachers who are already teaching in high schools in Malawi," Chamdimba said. "But I am also interested in seeing if we can get the University of Malawi to begin offering a degree in bioengineering with Rice's help."

In addition to Chamdimba, 11 teachers from the Houston area and five high school students attended the summer workshop.