Faculty

Core Team (EDSGN452)
Professor: Khanjan Mehta (Principal Investigator)
Senior Research Associate – ECS + Affiliate Faculty – SEDTAPP
Bio:  Khanjan Mehta is a Senior Research Associate in the Electronic and Computer Services (ECS) department and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs (SEDTAPP) in the College of Engineering at Penn State. His professional interests include innovative system integration, high-tech entrepreneurship and international social entrepreneurship. He has varied research interests including social networks, application of cellphones for development, innovation in engineering design education, indigenous knowledge systems, systems thinking, etc. Khanjan loves connecting concepts, people, computers and devices. A basic philosophy behind his work is the convergence of disciplines, concepts, cultures, and countries to create a freer, friendlier, fairer and more sustainable planet.Watch Khanjan discuss social entrepreneurship and Mashavu on Cornell eClips.
Personal Website: http://www.cedcc.psu.edu/khanjan/

Bioengineering Team (BIOE401)

Professor: Peter Butler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, BioEngineering
Bio: Dr. Butler joined the Penn State Bioengineering faculty in 2001 following 2-years of post-doctoral work in the department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego and graduate  work toward a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the City University of New York.  Dr. Butler earned his BA in Biology and English from Fordham University and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the City College of New York.
Personal Website: http://www.bioe.psu.edu/mechlab/index.html

Technical Writing Team(ENGL 202C)
Professor: Robert Bleil, Ph.D.
Assistant Director, Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities + Lecturer in English
Bio: Robert R. Bleil received his Ph.D. (December 2008) in English from Penn State University. A specialist in English and American literature of the fin-de-siècle (ca. 1880-1920), his interdisciplinary teaching and research interests include literary depictions of masculinity in the late-Victorian and Modernist periods, transatlantic literary exchanges, suffragette literature, the history of the book, textual scholarship, the history of libraries, and nineteenth-century English domestic art and architecture. His dissertation, Temporarily Devotedly Yours: The Letters of Ginevra King to F. Scott Fitzgerald, introduces readers to Ginevra King, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first significant romantic attachment, and makes available new information concerning Fitzgerald’s literary ambitions as an undergraduate at Princeton University. He is the recipient of a Waddell Biggart Graduate Fellowship, the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award, and travel grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Rob has delivered talks on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, American suffrage literature, and the illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.

Students

Core Team

• Kiosk Design & Biomedical Device Integration
• Website Development
• Clinical Encounter & Medical Appropriateness
• Concept of Operations
• Systemic Assessment
• Stakeholder Education
• User Experience
• Business & Marketing

Technical Writing Team

Bioengineering Team

Core Team

Kiosk Design & Biomedical Device Integration The kiosk development team ensures that the kiosk is properly working as an effective tool for the operators, patients, and doctors. The team works with the bioengineering team to integrate the medical devices, and the web development team to enable the doctors to access the data. The 2010 team is comprised of Alice Lee, a junior bioengineering student, and Stephen Suffian, a senior electrical engineering student.
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Website Development The Web Development Team ensures that the doctors can effectively access patient information while maintaining data privacy. Currently the team consists of Lauren Kuhne, a sophomore in IST program, and Jeff Lackey, a senior in Electrical Engineering.
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Clinical Encounter & Medical Appropriateness The goal of the Clinical Encounter and Medical Appropriateness team is to optimize clinical efficiency and ensure that the doctors are receiving accurate and essential patient data. The team this year consists of Jacqueline Bates, a junior double-majoring in Economics and CED (Community, Environment, and Development) and Richard Finn, a junior majoring in Pre-Medicine.
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Concept of Operations The purpose of this year’s Concept of Operations team is to create a detailed outline of the interactions among the kiosk operators, the doctors, and the patients. The team’s overall objective is to ensure that every Mashavu experience is conducted in the exact same manner at every kiosk location. The team consists of Samir Patel a sophomore in Biology and Economics and Roma Amin, a sophomore in Pre-Medicine.
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Systemic Assessment The Systemic Assessment Team is seeking quantifiable data from every level of the Mashavu system. With approval from the Pennsylvania State University’s Institutional Review Board, the team plans on employing surveys and forms to make sure that all measurements and patient statistics are recorded in a standardized yet thorough manner. The team is comprised of Tara Sulewski, a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, Carey Bell, a junior majoring in Political Science, and Rachel Dzombak, a sophomore majoring in Bioengineering.
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Stakeholder Education The team is responsible for educating each individual, including the doctors, workers, and corporations dealing with Mashavu. The team’s main goal is to provide materials suited for the different stakeholders which are unique to their backgrounds. Materials employed by the team will range from basic health care facts to kiosk operation manual. Currently, two Penn State bioengineering students, Brittany Flaherty and Tara Yunkunis, are make up the Stakeholder Education team.
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User Experience The User Experience team includes the “Social” and “Fun” teams from last year and is focused on Mashavu Users – patients, operators, and doctors – and their individual experiences with Mashavu. The team works with the other teams to address the needs of the users, the usability of the devices, instant gratification, and social appropriateness of Mashavu. The members of the User Experience team are Gillian Love, an undergraduate Biology major and Brianna Buehler, a graduate student in the School of International Affairs.
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Business & Marketing As a new addition to the Mashavu project, the business and marketing team is geared towards developing a feasible structure to accommodate the involvement of Mashavu’s potential stakeholders. The team is aimed at creating a system to fulfill the respective incentives of each stakeholder. Currently the team consists of Kelsey Richards, a junior year Marketing student, Shengnan Chen a freshman majoring in Psychology and CED, and Valerie Igbinoghene a graduate student in the School of International affairs major.
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Technical Writing Team

The English 202c class has joined forces with the Mashavu core team to advance the work and prospects of the Mashavu program. Two groups have been designed to research current telemedicine systems in the specific areas of concept of operations and technological integration. These researches are made in effort to produce the most efficient Mashavu telemedicine system within our current resources. The concept of operations team consists of members René Ruggiero, Harold Dunn, Rebecca Mendenhall and Jessica Wilcox. The technological integration team consists of members Alexandra Cortese, Lauren Moore, Mike Plavchak, and Maya Agyei-Owusu.
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Bioenigeering Team

In order to keep the Mashavu system affordable for the context of Africa, the devices which are used at the kiosk must be inexpensive but still reliable. The bioengineering teams from the Penn State course BioE 401 spend an entire spring semester working on these goals. For the 2010 spring semester, the class was split into 8 teams to work on: stethoscope, sphymomomonater, spirometer, calibration for the spirometer, pulse oximeter, baby weighing scale, adult weighing scale, and temperature. These students encompass an entire design process within the spring months to find the best solution for accurate and inexpensive biomedical devices. They use their prior bioengineering education, along with different elements for design learned throughout this design class, to convert devices based solely on hardware into instruments with little hardware that are mainly based on the software LabVIEW. This conversion allows for these instruments to be created in an inexpensive manner and fit within the Mashavu system.

Click here to access the Bio Engineering student pages.

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