Ryan Tennant is interested in bridging health care and engineering. From co-op terms and research projects at Sunnybrook and Sick Kids hospitals to developing a medical device at a company in Switzerland, he’s always looking to use his biomedical engineering education to improve the world around him.
Even so, Tennant didn’t expect that, less than a year into his PhD, he’d be launching an app for staff in COVID-19 vaccine clinics. In July, he began pilot testing the app at the Health Sciences Campus (HSC) Clinic, a regional vaccination clinic led by the Centre for Family Medicine and hosted in the University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy.
With
a BASc
in
Biomedical
Engineering and
a
MASc in Systems
Design
Engineering,
both
from
Waterloo,
Tennant studies human
factors
engineering,
a
branch
of
the
discipline
that
examines
how
tools,
machines
and
systems
are
designed
to
reflect
the
capabilities
and
limitations
of
their
users.
“Given
my background,
my co-supervisor
professor Catherine Burns and
I
met
with pharmacy
professor Kelly
Grindrod
and Moses Tetui, her post-doc
researcher,”
says Tennant. “The
clinic
had
just
opened,
and
Kelly
described some
of
the workflow challenges involved. I quickly saw that a
human
factors
perspective
could help support
the vaccine
roll-out in
the
region.”
Read
the
full
story
in
Waterloo
News.