Jun 28, 2007 - Claremont, Calif. - Global Clinic is underway in Singapore this summer with Professor of Chemistry Shenda Baker at the helm while the program’s founder, Professor of Engineering Anthony Bright, is on sabbatical leave.

Three students from HMC and three from the National University of Singapore (NUS) are teaming up on a project sponsored by Applied Biosystems, a producer of real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) instrumentation. The students have been asked to design and build a prototype of a low-cost, robust, real-time PCR instrument for the educational market.

PCR is a technique for isolating and amplifying a fragment of DNA via enzymatic replication. Applied Biosystems, which is based in Foster City, Calif. and has sites around the world, has sponsored six Clinic projects at HMC since 2001, including two last year.

HMC engineering majors Jeffrey Rubinstein ‘08, Alexandria Kealey ‘08 and Jonathan Chen ‘08 left June 1 for Singapore to get to know their Singapore teammates, learn about the culture and begin research on their project. In July, the students from Singapore—Cedric Tan Kai Wei, Sharon Ci’En Chang and Xiaodi Sui—will return with Mudd students to experience American culture and work on the Clinic project. Pitzer College is providing cross-cultural education for the team, including technical writing and business presentations.

The NUS students, who are being advised by NUS faculty member Maxey Chung and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Science Roger Tan Choon Ee, will return to Singapore July 28. As with the first Global Clinic in Puerto Rico in 2006-07, students will continue communicating via e-mail, video and teleconferencing, and multi-conferencing with the company liaison.

While the HMC students are all engineers, the NUS students are majoring in life sciences, bioengineering and physics. “Applied Biosystems has presented the team with a really exciting, multidisciplinary and fundamentally cool problem—it’s the perfect systems engineering project,” Baker explained. “We’re fortunate to have a team of exceptionally bright students working on it.”

“I’ve had tremendous support from the Department of Engineering,” Baker continued. She praised the efforts of engineering faculty Clive Dym, Elizabeth Orwin and Patrick Little, who will be offering the team classes in engineering design and project management to help guide them through the project.

Applied Biosystems’ Ken Livak ‘74 (Southern California) and project liaison Adrian Fawcett (Singapore), also earned Baker’s appreciation. “They went so far as to give us a variety of PCRs to ‘break apart,’” she said.

Baker’s enthusiasm for the Global Clinic concept is infectious and driven by her belief in the HMC mission. “This program allows us to go places, solve problems and serve society,” she said. “My dream is that this won’t be just Clinic done globally, but Clinic solving global problems.”