Kelley Elahi Honored with BME Alumni Award
Kelley Elahi, a University of Michigan Biomedical Engineering alumnus, received this year’s Michigan Engineering Outstanding Recent Alumni Award.
October 23, 2019
In only 8 years, Kelley has already established herself as an accomplished leader in global health. As a design engineer at MTTS in Hanoi, Vietnam, Kelley developed an infant continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) device to help neonates breathe and an LED-based phototherapy device for jaundice treatment. She helped set up neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) with such equipment in 11 hospitals in Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines, and India. At Rice 360, Kelley led a team of engineers and managed multiple global health technology development projects. Kelley’s work has been publicly recognized at the international level. She has published 5 peer-reviewed articles and delivered 8 oral presentations, including at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. Witnessing the dire circumstances in low-resource hospital wards inspired Kelley to combine nursing training with her engineering background to provide more hands-on, comprehensive care. Her goal is to function as a link between the fields of nursing and engineering to bridge the perspectives of the user and the engineer. Presently, she is a Registered Nurse at the prestigious Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago where she continues to develop as a leader at the intersection of nursing, biomedical engineering, and global health.