The national Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) recently awarded BMES at UCLA a student chapter award for the third consecutive year

Jul 26, 2021

The national Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) recently awarded BMES at UCLA a student chapter award for the third consecutive year.  The student group will receive their Outstanding Outreach Award at the upcoming 2021 Annual BMES meeting in Orlando, Florida.  Despite the pandemic moving interactions to an online format for the 2020-2021 Academic Year, BMES at UCLA added a second partner school to their program Reaching and Inspiring Students in Engineering (RISE).  RISE teaches Computer Aided Design (CAD), circuits, and Arduino coding to students at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood and Fairfax High School in Fairfax.  Both schools have a significant underrepresented minority population as well as a large percentage of students coming from low-income backgrounds.  The program provides students in underserved communities with opportunities to explore the vast possibilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to expand their education without financial concerns.  BMES at UCLA purchased Arduino Unos and Adafruit circuitry kits for high school students in the program and shipped them to the schools, where volunteers in BMES at UCLA would then teach students over Zoom how to build LED circuits with the Arduino, breadboard, and other various hardware components.  The volunteers also hosted Zoom sessions where they would help guide the middle school students on using TinkerCAD to build basic circuits and design 3D objects.  The pandemic also did not prevent BMES at UCLA from holding its annual Food Drive.  The students were creative and found a way to leverage the virtual format by developing “bingo cards” in the context of Instagram Stories.  The students in BMES at UCLA were able to raise a total of $577 for the Los Angeles Food Bank.  Thank you to all the students in BMES at UCLA for their outreach efforts, and congratulations on being recognized again at the national level.