Rebecca Richards-Kortum, PhD, will deliver the 35th John S. Latta Lecture on April 18. The lecture will be delivered from noon to 1 p.m. CDT in a hybrid format, via Zoom and in the atrium of the Wigton Heritage Center on UNMC’s Omaha campus.
Dr. Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and director of the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health in the department of bioengineering at Rice University.
Her lecture, “NEST360: How Engineers and Clinicians Can Work Together to Transform Outcomes for Small and Sick Newborns in Low-Resource Settings,” will describe how clinicians and engineers in the NEST360 (Newborn Essential Solutions & Technologies) program are working with African governments to implement a package of care to improve newborn survival in district hospitals, including
- delivering and maintaining a bundle of rugged, effective devices for newborn care;
- educating clinicians and biomedical technicians to use and maintain devices;
- implementing evidence-based care for small and sick newborns using locally owned dashboards to track and improve the quality of care; and
- catalyzing country-led change and investment to strengthen newborn care and technology management policies to promote equitable scaling and sustainability.
The lecture also will cover how lessons from this work can apply more broadly to clinical and scientific collaborations.
An advance RSVP is requested by April 11. Lunch is available for the first 80 registrants. For those participating only via Zoom, lunches may be taken to go. An email will be sent the day before the event with further details.