Stanford engineering student helps leverage solar for health in the developing world
This is the second of four Stanford student stories about the students Endless supports the Cardinal Quarter fellows program.
While summer may be a time to pack your bags and head somewhere sunny, Emma Morgan (Stanford Class of ’20, Mechanical Engineering) got the order mixed up. She spent the middle months of 2019 gathering rays in suitcases, not for recreation, but for health.
Emma spent her summer in Berkeley, CA, working with We Care Solar, an organization that builds Solar Suitcases, solar-powered kits with surgical lighting, headlamps, and USB chargers for medical devices like fetal dopplers.
“For engineering, I created a database to collect and store maintenance data transmitted from the suitcases so that we can remotely diagnose problems and coordinate repairs more effectively,” she says, and “for the development team, I wrote reports for donors on our current campaign in Zimbabwe and designed the website for our Light Every Birth initiative, an international effort to ensure every eligible health center in five participating countries has clean energy for safe childbirth.”
Emma says her most significant contribution was creating the database from which information from the devices could be easily shared with nontechnical users.
“That would not have been finished without my involvement and it will act as an invaluable tool for the organization for years to come.” Emma says she designed the project from start to finish, from researching basic principles behind databases to executable code with all of the desired functionality. Though she didn't have much direction from her supervisors, this allowed her the autonomy and creative control to really take ownership of the project.
“The database will save money and will help increase the longevity of the solar suitcases, allowing each suitcase to provide life-saving light for more deliveries,” Emma says, because one of the most expensive parts of We Care Solar's operations is sending technicians to remote clinics for maintenance and repairs. The new database can help in tracking the progress of the suitcases and potentially diagnose problems without sending anyone into the field. This is important to the sustainability of the Solar Suitcase and will save the organization money that can be put toward distributing more suitcases and saving more lives.
Over the course of the summer, Emma learned a lot about databases and added two new programming languages, SQL and HTML to her skill set. She also learned much on the development side about the issues We Care Solar addresses and how the non-profit operates. She also worked with the development team to research fundraising opportunities and wrote progress reports for donors on current initiatives.
While in her role, she was able to gain many professional skills as well as confidence in her own abilities as a computer scientist. But her experience with We Care Solar not only taught her about computer science, she says, it also opened her eyes to the importance of working on a project she’s passionate about.
“It was a completely different experience than other projects I have worked on because I knew I was contributing to saving lives and having a positive impact on the world.”
We Care Solar is an organization dedicated to reducing maternal mortality in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, mobile communication, and medical devices using solar electricity. In addition to medical lighting and devices, the Solar Suitcases also power communications equipment, and have critical to decreasing maternal mortality in developing countries with little or no access to reliable electricity.