Taylor Oeschger, 2nd year Biomedical Engineering student working in MAE wins first prize.

Taylor Oeschger, a 2nd year Biomedical Engineering student working in MAE, and 5 other engineering graduate students traveled to the Society of Women in Engineering Local conference in Baltimore, Maryland February 8-9, 2019.

Taylor competed in the graduate level poster and presentation competition and received first prize for her research on a point of care diagnostic for sepsis. Her objective for the project aims to design, manufacture, and clinically test a microfluidic chip for rapid detection of sepsis. Sepsis is treatable with antibiotics, when identified early. During sepsis the immune system ramps up to fight the infection and then becomes exhausted and paralyzed. The device aims to monitor these stages in hopes of initiating treatment before severe organ damage occurs. She concludes that rapid immune system monitoring has the potential to rapidly detect sepsis and replace current non-specific and ineffective sepsis scoring systems. Rapid diagnosis has the potential to save millions of live and accurate diagnosis can reduce the antibiotic resistant burden. Additionally, a POC diagnostic for sepsis would broadly help those in developed hospitals but also in low resource settings.

This work was completed as a co-mentorship between the labs of David Erickson and Ankur Singh.

WE Local is a Society of Women Engineers (SWE) program that brings together participants in all stages of their collegiate and professional journey. The program hosts conferences across the globe so engineers can connect through professional development workshops, inspirational speakers, networking opportunities and outreach activities.