While attending MIT, senior Abigail Schipper volunteered as an emergency physician for MIT EMS, a student-run ambulance that serves MIT community as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts and Boston.
As a first responder, she witnessed a disturbing paradox: By day, she would be studying state-of-the-art medical technology in a biomedical engineering course; During the day, she would study state-of-the-art medical technology in a biomedical engineering course; However, at night, she witnessed “people with completely preventable diseases sleeping on the doorsteps of the best hospitals in the world.”
This inspired Schipper to dedicate her career to increasing people’s access to medical advancements.
As a mechanical engineering major majoring in biomedicine and minoring in biology, Schipper has approached health equity issues from multiple directions including research, innovation and community service. For example, as a student researcher she worked on a self-dissolving birth control implant, and inspired by her work as a CPR instructor, she helped create an affordable CPR model with a breast for use in training sessions.
As Schipper nears the end of her undergraduate studies, she is looking forward to pursuing a master’s degree in public health before entering medical school to expand her horizons in medicine.
“At MIT, I had the opportunity to view healthcare from a healthcare provider perspective as well as from an engineer’s perspective through my research. However, as I worked to solve these design challenges, I was constantly faced with policy Issues — medical debt that left one of my patients on the street, or changing reproductive health laws. If the system around the device doesn’t fit, the device won’t work,” Schipper said. “Before attending medical school, I would like to spend a year studying the broader health care system and learning best practices for analyzing and researching these health equity issues in order to more effectively address them.”
“MIT just lets you do things”
Schipper joined MIT EMS as a first-year student in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. To help, she began the long training process to become certified as an emergency responder and make emergency calls alongside classmates and faculty and staff volunteers. She joked that she had another motivation: “I thought if I knew how to drive an ambulance in Boston, I would be a cooler person.”
During her sophomore year, Schipper organized all the CPR classes held by MIT EMS, certifying thousands of people. She said it was a “weird” activity for a 19-year-old, but admitted, “MIT just lets you do things, and it’s fun.”
By his junior year, Speer was elected director of operations. During this time, she worked to purchase a second ambulance for MIT EMS to expand immediate coverage of 911 calls on campus. “Mutual aid is an important part of what MIT EMS does,” she said, explaining that increasing emergency response times is critical to maintaining the health and well-being of the communities MIT EMS serves.
Although “retired” from his administrative position, Speer now serves as team leader at MIT’s Emergency Center and leads the “Stop the Bleed” program, an emergency care training course for the public focused on treating serious wounds.
She credits her emergency experience with connecting her to the people of Greater Boston. “One-third of our calls are made on campus, but two-thirds are just Cambridge and Boston 911 calls, so you can really be part of the community. I feel more connected to Boston than many of my peers. The connection is much stronger,” she said.
Innovation for fairness
While working as a CPR instructor, Schipper noticed there were no breast mannequins in training sessions and was often asked by students whether women could receive the chest compressions required for CPR. “I saw what was offered to me and thought, ‘I’m a mechanical engineer. I think I can do better,'” she said.
Schipper co-founded the LifeSaveHer project with a team of bioengineers, mechanical engineers, and social scientists from MIT EMS and Harvard Crimson EMS to produce affordable, anatomically realistic breast mannequins for use in gender equity. CPR training. According to the program’s website, women are 29% less likely than men to survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and 27% less likely to receive bystander CPR. The team is currently supported by the MIT PKG IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge, which awarded LifeSaveHer the top prize in the 2023 competition.
Gender equity in health is also a focus of Schipper’s undergraduate research program in the lab of associate professor Gio Traverso, who helped create a birth control implant that dissolves in the body. “Current birth control implants last about three years and usually require surgical intervention to remove,” she explains. “If you don’t have access to surgical facilities, this may not be practical for you, but you should still choose a simple contraceptive method.”
Speer also took her public health research abroad. In the summer of 2023, she is working in the Find and Treat service at University College London Hospitals. In London, she also studied air filtration and worked to reduce the risk of infectious diseases by making low-cost carbon dioxide sensors.
importance of community
Building strong social relationships has always been an integral part of the Speer student experience, both in her research and in her extracurricular activities.
Schipper, like MIT EMS, is a member of the Sigma Kappa and Burton Third Bombers living communities. She appreciates the interesting opportunities her living community creates that busy MIT students struggle to find time to enjoy. On her dorm room floor, “Whatever silly idea you had, there were at least 10 people willing to do it with you,” she said.
Looking back on the past three years, Speer said, “Coming into MIT as a freshman, a lot of what I was doing felt very disconnected. I was building this ambulance, but I was also joining this fraternity, And I was also studying mechanical engineering. As I progressed, everything solidified and then grew off each other. MIT gave me a lot of support and opportunities to find a central thing and then do it in a way that made a lot of sense way to pursue branching.”