Abigail Schipper, a senior biomedical engineer and EMT at MIT, is striving to bridge the gap between the accessibility of advanced medical technology and the healthcare needs of the underprivileged. Her goal is to harness her engineering skills and first-hand experience as a first responder to help alleviate healthcare inequalities. MIT News reports on her efforts.
Schipper has taken initiative to rectify gender imbalance in CPR training, having noted the lack of female manikins in such courses. Together with a team of bioengineers, mechanical engineers, and social scientists from MIT EMS and Harvard's Crimson EMS, she co-founded the LifeSaveHer project. The project's objective is to produce affordable, anatomically accurate manikins with breasts to ensure balanced CPR training. MIT News reveals that this project won the top spot in the 2023 MIT PKG IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge competition.
Additionally, Schipper's commitment to addressing healthcare access issues extends to her scholarly work. In Associate Professor Gio Traverso’s lab, she helped develop a self-dissolving birth control implant, offering women non-surgical contraceptive options. This innovation aligns with her mission of advocating for health equity.
To broaden her public health research efforts, Schipper has taken her work internationally. With backing from the MIT-UK program at MISTI, she collaborated with the Find and Treat service at the University College London Hospital last summer. Through this opportunity, Schipper developed inexpensive carbon dioxide sensors and studied airborne filtration to mitigate the risk of infectious diseases. More of her work is documented by MIT News.
Schipper has also taken on leadership roles within MIT EMS. This involvement resulted in getting a second ambulance for the service and improving the emergency response times in the MIT community. Her contributions have overall improved health outcomes in Cambridge and Boston as well.
As for her future plans, Schipper aims to pursue a master's degree in public health and later attend medical school. She hopes to leverage her broad understanding of medicine to address healthcare policy challenges and their impact on accessibility. She emphasizes that a medical device's efficiency is determined by the system it operates within.
