Engineering education
Development of medical devices
Research in ophthalmology
In a five-year renewal to our NIH R25 grant that established the Clinical Immersion Program at UIC, we have developed a sustainable student-driven pipeline for innovation between BME and Innovation Medicine (IMED) students. The pipeline consists of a new class to develop prototyping skills, a revised clinical immersion program, an accelerated senior design course, and an IMED capstone for longitudinal medical device development and innovation. With this pipeline, we aim to authentically enhance BME student training and participation in a comprehensive process to translate and commercialize designs that originate from validated clinical needs so that they can improve public health.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) Program is designed to offer scholarships, mentorship, and supplemental opportunities to students. From 2017-2022, Dr. Felder participated in an S-STEM grant in the UIC College of Engineering. Dr. Felder co-developed an advanced mentoring program with Dr. Betul Bilgin as part of this program.
There is a notable lack of women in engineering, with women of color being especially poorly represented. The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) has supported the Summer Engineering Experience for Kids) since 2007 to address this issue. However, the program lacked any biomedical engineering education. My co-authors and I developed two modules for the SEEK program that are freely available.
Dr. Felder has extensive experience in medical device innovation. Dr. Felder founded ORBITlab in 2017 - an interdisciplinary collaboration for the development of novel ophthalmic medical devices - and served as Technical Director there until 2021. Dr. Felder also worked with a medical device accelerator at UIC (MAD lab) for years. Now Dr. Felder partners with clinicians and researchers privately and through his senior design course to develop innovative medical devices. Some projects are listed below:
a modular and automated syringe pump stirrer to maintain colloidal suspensions
a catheter system for delivery of large payloads to the posterior eye
a biofeedback device to assist in the second stage of labor
an affordable thoracentesis trainer
a machine learning algorithm to locate bleeding in endoscopic spinal surgery
a novel container for storage and delivery of a lyophilized product to the eye
an illuminated scleral depressor
an open and scalable platform for automated eye tracking
The retina is a thin piece of tissue at the posterior of the eye that provides vision. Despite being so small, it requires two distinct vascular beds and consumes the most oxygen per mass of any tissue in the human body. My research into the retina and oxygenation has developed over many years. Some themes are listed below:
Development of optical imaging systems to study retinal oxygenation and metabolism in health and disease
Development of optical imaging systems to study conjunctival hemodynamics in health and disease
Development of image analysis algorithms to identify and quantify novel biomarkers of retinal oxygenation in health and disease
Development of novel ophthalmic medical devices