Designing solutions to ensure equity in health care
Growing up in the Boston suburbs, MIT senior Daisy Wang spent her spare time upside down underwater, dancing with her competitive artistic swimming team.
“It feels like you and your teammates are one unit in the water, moving and working together, and there is an incredible amount of trust involved with all of the lifts and throws,” she said from her dorm room on campus.
From synchronized swimming, Wang learned a valuable lesson about how people are deeply interconnected: One person’s challenge is everyone’s challenge. Many evenings, when Wang isn’t at MIT, she can be found pacing the deck of the very same pool at Cambridge Synchro, where she’s moved into a coaching role on the team.
Wang is an aspiring physician, majoring in biological engineering and minoring in women’s and gender studies. She says what pulls her into both disciplines is a passion for engineering solutions for social problems that have the potential to effect systemic change.
“I am a completely different person in my biological engineering classes and my women’s and gender studies courses,” Wang says. Biological engineering demands creative problem-solving and boundless iteration, while women’s and gender studies requires a different, equally critical skill set, she says.
“From my first WGS.101 class, we have never just read a static text. We apply the texts to our lives and share our personal experiences, looking at the real world through a gender framework,” she says.
Finding ways to benefit society
In fall 2023, Wang’s two academic worlds unexpectedly collided in class 20.380 (Biological Engineering Design), a capstone course in which small groups of undergraduates integrate theoretical knowledge to design hypothetical new products to benefit society.
She explains, “My team wanted to come up with a system that could automatically sense opioid overdose in drug users and administer an emergency treatment of Narcan (naloxone HCI).”
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that in 2021, there were 80,411 opioid overdose deaths in the United States. Although Narcan, a drug that rapidly reverses overdose, is increasingly available at major drug stores like CVS, Wang and her colleagues noted that Narcan cannot be self-administered.
Many overdoses take place when users are alone. Wang says, “Narcan works by binding to the opioid receptors and acts as an antagonist. Our idea was to develop a microneedle patch to detect and treat overdose.”
As Wang learned more about the opioid epidemic, she realized that, “Ultimately, new technologies mean nothing if we can’t make them work for the people that need them.”
In her work as an intern in the Health Equity Research Lab at Cambridge Health Alliance, she sees this firsthand in a local hospital system. With funding from the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center at MIT, Wang is helping a team analyze data regarding the implementation of a mental health survey tool used by clinicians to monitor patients’ symptoms.
She says, “Right now, this is a digital survey tool — and that’s actually a big equity issue. For example, many patients don’t speak English, and some don’t have access to a phone with internet access, which is how the survey is administered.” Wang is digging deeply into both qualitative and quantitative data to make recommendations for improving this tool for the future.
The internship helped her determine that she wants to specialize in implementation science as a physician, studying how evidence-based solutions are translated into practice and made accessible to patient populations.
“Passion breeds passion”
Back on campus, Wang is the operations chair of PLEASURE@MIT, a student-led group that sets out to increase positive relationships on campus through education and shifting cultural norms. She often facilitates peer-to-peer workshops and training on sensitive topics like safe sex, consent, self-love, and positive body image.
This experience of facilitating difficult conversations, listening deeply, and helping to support a community translated into fieldwork in Oyugis, Kenya, this January as a student enrolled in EC.718/WGS. 277 (MIT D-Lab Gender and Development course). The class was co-taught by Sally Haslanger, the Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies, and D-Lab lecturer Libby McDonald.
In the field, Wang and peers supported an ongoing D-Lab initiative in collaboration with an in-country community-based organization, the Society Empowerment Project. Together, they aimed to co-design solutions for educating youth on menstrual and reproductive health and ways to support teen parents.
Her biggest takeaway was observing, “Passion breeds passion.” That was especially true among team members who gave up sleep each night of the trip to prepare slides for the following day’s workshop and motivated one another to care deeply about the community. She says, “This was also applicable to the participants who commuted from far away to partake in the workshop and reflect deeply on solutions.”
The experience in Kenya brought together Wang’s studies, research, internship, and even her biggest future goal of becoming a physician advocating for patients.
She dove in with excitement, but just like in synchronized swimming, Wang says, “We did everything in true partnership with the team on the ground. While we provided support about the design cycle and logistics of ideation, imaging, prototyping, and testing, our partners were the ones thinking up their own program.” One move at a time.
Programming functional fabrics
Encouraged by her family, Lavender Tessmer explored various creative pursuits from a young age, particularly textiles, including knitting and crocheting. When she came to MIT, she figured that working with textiles would remain just a hobby; she never expected them to become integral to her career path.
However, when she interviewed for a research assistant position in Self Assembly Lab, it just so happened that the lab had recently received funding from the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, one of the manufacturing institutes launched during the Obama administration, for a textile-based project.
Tessmer, now a fifth-year doctoral student in design and computation within the School of Architecture of Planning, took on the project, working with Skylar Tibbits, associate professor of design research, and Caitlin Muller, associate professor in building technology. “At MIT, my interest in textiles really exploded and became the center of everything,” Tessmer says.
While textiles may appear commonplace, the Covid-19 pandemic underscored the need for textile products in safeguarding our general health and safety, particularly through the filtration necessary for masks. Recognizing the importance of manufacturing capabilities for textiles, Tessmer’s research has focused on programming textiles with specific functional properties while also considering the feasibility of large-scale manufacturing of such products.
A nonlinear path to MIT
Tessmer studied music as an undergraduate student at Duquesne University, pursuing a passion that bloomed as a high schooler. One assignment opened her eyes to a different career path: She was told to compare a piece of music to some other artistic medium. Through this assignment, she discovered the world of architecture by underscoring the systematic nature of both disciplines, emphasizing the need for repetition and structure to unleash creativity. “I immediately realized that’s what I want to do,” she says.
Tessmer switched gears and decided to devote the year after college to architecture, instead of auditioning for music ensembles. She says, “I always liked making things, and then, with architecture, I realized that you can make things as part of your profession.” She relied on the basic drafting skills that her father had taught her, and channeled these into building her architecture portfolio.
Ultimately, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. She graduated with her master’s at the end of the 2007 economic recession, a time when jobs in architecture were scarce. She eagerly accepted a part-time role teaching at WashU. Over the next five years, this role evolved into a full-time lecturer role, where she taught students while also independently establishing her own design practice and leading various installation design projects. Fittingly, all of the installations were inspired by textiles. “They were these high-performance carbon-fiber braided structures that we hand-made into large-scale braided nets with specific geometries,” Tessmer explains.
“Squeezing everything” out of graduate school
Teaching at WashU was a great experience, but the practice-oriented nature of the architecture department motivated Tessmer to seek complementary perspectives on design. “I wanted a totally new venue that was supportive of research and pushing the boundaries of design. I wanted to see what other approaches were out there,” she says. As her interests continued to grow in that direction, she learned that MIT has some renowned researchers in the field. She decided to apply for a master’s degree in architecture studies, and ultimately a doctorate in design and computation, within the School of Architecture and Planning.
MIT’s program stood out to Tessmer because of the interdisciplinary approach of the architecture department. She says, “If you are an architect or designer, it is not strange to end up in a class full of people who are not architects, and that’s totally normal and even expected.” The integrated nature of her program is a shift from her previous academic experiences, where each discipline had been distinct and separate. She also values the lack of hierarchy between different disciplines within the architecture department here. “There is respect across disciplines for the contribution from each participant,” she says.
As an older student, Tessmer has a slightly different approach to graduate school, compared to her peers. She says, “MIT is amazing because there is so much variety and so many things that you can get involved in. But my style is to be hyperfocused on my interests. For me, there have been huge benefits to focusing on this specific thing and squeezing everything I can out of it, even in the face of all of these other opportunities.”
Tessmer has devoted herself to several projects throughout grad school, but all share a common thread: an emphasis on fiber development and textile programming. As a master’s student in the Self Assembly Lab, she utilized the inherent properties of materials and optimized their configurations for specific functions by integrating computation into the material itself. “At MIT, I learned a much broader definition of computation,” she says. “For example, in the Self Assembly Lab, we believe that material is a storage format of information and that you can program material to behave in certain ways.”
The first project Tessmer worked on was designing a fiber that could respond to temperature fluctuations. Another project focused on embedding many different properties within a single fabric, potentially for astronauts. “The human body is so varied in the number of properties that you need to match,” she says. In conjunction with collaborators across multiple MIT departments, she designed a spacesuit sleeve with embedded padding, stretchable areas, a compression gradient, and various sensors. Her third project has focused on embedding shapechange behavior into fabric structures to enhance human comfort or fit, as an alternative to manual tailoring. Finally, in a return to her architectural roots, she is also working on designing a reinforced concrete beam using textiles, a more sustainable solution to building with concrete, which has a significant carbon footprint.
Another crucial aspect of Tessmer’s research is her focus on the feasibility of large-scale manufacturing for a product. She regularly relies on industrial-scale machinery and consults with manufacturing partners. She says, “The way research is being conducted in the lab is a close parallel to how it would be made in real life. The potential for a direct bridge between one and the other is a high priority for me and a constraint that I have tried to layer on to all of my projects.”
Dabbling in entrepreneurship
Tessmer says with a laugh, “My entire hobby [textiles] has now been absorbed into my research. So I am in the market for a new hobby.” For now, that hobby has taken the form of entrepreneurship. She has been exploring the commercialization potential of her technologies, having filed multiple patents and completed the Blueprint program with The Engine Accelerator. She hopes that one day her method for embedding properties in textiles, while also reducing manufacturing process steps, will be used for commercial fabrics.
As an example, she points to shoe manufacturing. “Your shoes are normally an assembly of lots of different materials and lots of different layers. Instead, my proposal to The Engine focused on embedding all of these properties in an automated way, eliminating the need for an extensive assembly process.” Tessmer envisions entrepreneurship as one of her potential future paths.
For the time being, however, she plans to remain in academia. “From the outside, being a professor seems like an unattainable position. However, I keep being surprised at my ability to get to the next level of the academic hierarchy.” She aims to integrate all her past experiences into a future research career, designing textiles within an architectural context, while also weaving in the constraints of manufacturing scalability.