Scholarship Winners Share Goal of Helping Patients and the Profession
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| Avinash Konkani | |
Avinash Konkani, 33, had to wait until he grew up to get the full story on his father’s death. What he eventually learned inspired Konkani to become a biomedical engineer.
“My father passed away in a hospital due to a wrong treatment,” says Konkani, who was 14 when his father died. “It started with a problem in his hip joint. He got some pain medication, and was given some high dosage. After finding that out, I wanted to be in the field of medicine and help other patients to get better healthcare.”
Konkani is now pursuing his PhD in systems engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. He was selected for a $2,500 scholarship under the AAMI Foundation’s Michael J. Miller Scholarship Program. Robin Cady, a biomedical engineering technology student at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, also received $2,500.
This is the third year scholarships were awarded to two students working towards careers in healthcare technology management. Nearly halfway through a five-year PhD program, Konkani says he wants to be a human factors specialist in a hospital or in the device industry. “I want to apply human factors in hospitals to make the working environment with medical devices so simple that risk can be reduced,” he says. “Everything comes back to patient safety.”
Konkani says the scholarship will provide income for the summer for his family. “This past semester I worked as a teaching assistant, but during the summer I don’t get any pay,” he says.
Konkani was happily surprised by the scholarship. “I didn’t believe it at first,” he says. “I had to read the notification e-mail twice to make sure.”
‘Time to Complete It’
Cady has actually been a biomed for 24 years, and even though she was initially trained by the Air Force, she still wanted to get a college degree.
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| Robin Cady | |
“One thing after another kept me from finishing my degree, and when I turned 40 I decided it was time to complete it,” says Cady, who is a full-time student at IUPUI and hopes to graduate next year with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering technology.
Realizing that goal hasn’t been easy. In 2006, Cady started taking IUPUI classes online while she worked as an imaging service engineer for ARAMARK Healthcare Technologies in Hawaii. Last year, she left ARAMARK to move to Tennessee to take care of her parents.
Cady says she is grateful for the scholarship because she lost tuition assistance after leaving ARAMARK. “It’s expensive when you don’t have a corporation behind you helping to pay expenses,” she says.
Cady moved to Noblesville, IN, in December to attend classes full time. She wants to get her master’s degree so she can become a teacher. “I want to teach others, and women in particular. I want to be instrumental in helping women get into this field,” she says. “I spent the last 10 years in Hawaii, and I didn’t see another female that works on radiology equipment. There should be more of us out there.”
AAMI News: June 2012, Vol. 47, No. 6