BME student named Engineering's 2024 Co-op Student of the Year
Jarett Dewbury (he/him), a third-year Engineering student majoring in Biomedical Engineering, is the Faculty of Engineering Co-op Student of the Year for his outstanding contributions at the Tadesse Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Jarett with Dr. Maud Gorbet, BME undergraduate program director, at the award ceremony.
His groundbreaking work, in collaboration with Google, focused on addressing antimicrobial resistance in low-resource settings using AI-driven diagnostics.
At the Tadesse Lab at MIT, Jarett focused on combating antimicrobial resistance in low-resource communities. Collaborating with Google, his project explored how bacterial infections, which are responsible for 30 per cent of deaths in these regions, could be better diagnosed with accessible technology.
Current diagnostic tools are often too resource-intensive for these regions. To address this challenge, Jarett’s team used machine learning with Raman spectroscopy, which extracts a pathogen’s unique chemical fingerprint, enabling more efficient, low-cost diagnostics.
A major challenge in pathogen classification is that existing models struggle to generalize across clinical data due to inter-patient variability. Jarett worked on improving training techniques to enhance model adaptability in real-world settings. His contributions helped advance scalable solutions for antimicrobial resistance detection, supporting global health care efforts.
Learn more about Jarett's co-op experience.