July 12, 2013 –
Bioengineering Ph.D. student Sylvia Natividad-Diaz has won second place in the Prize for Primary Healthcare, a CIMIT – Ambulatory Practice of the Future competition.
This award for technology innovation is designed to encourage engineering students to apply their skills toward developing novel approaches supporting the work of primary caregivers in healthcare.
Natividad-Diaz won $100,000 for her promising new approach for cell sorting of blood samples. The most immediate application is to help HIV patients of limited resources to manage their medications. Her technology requires no electrical power and utilizes very low-cost disposables to easily establish CD4+ cell counts from small samples. She is a member of Professor Kevin Healy’s lab.
The annual Prize is conducted by the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology with Ambulatory Practice of the Future, an initiative of Massachusetts General Hospital, and made possible through a generous gift from the Gelfand Family Charitable Trust.
Congratulations Sylvia!