With an increase in humanitarian protracted crises around the world, due to conflict and natural disasters, we are in dire need to reinvent how we educate, train, and conduct research in these environments. Engineering and Health Sciences disciplines, individually and collectively, have been working to fill the gaps and address pressing public health issues. However, courses merging those disciplines and focusing on emerging humanitarian challenges have been limited. To meet this need, and to expose the complexity of refugee health and well-being, AUB' Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) and the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture (MSFEA) jointly with Boston University (BU) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) launched the Humanitarian Engineering course “Design of Engineering Solutions for Health Challenges in Crisis” in July 2017.
Researchers from FHS, MSFEA, BU and JHU conducted a study "Humanitarian Engineering Design for Health Challenges: An Inter-faculty Service Based Learning Model" to evaluate this unique inter-faculty service learning course as a pedagogical model that enhances students’ learning and knowledge of health problems and associated engineering intervention design for populations affected by protracted crises.
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