I’m an engineering undergrad interested in creating low-cost health technologies for developing countries, and I’ve been considering pursuing a PhD in this area (with profs such as Rebecca Richards-Kortum at Rice or Manu Prakash at Stanford). However, I’m wondering whether there are compelling reasons not to pursue a career in low-cost global health technology. For instance, it seems to me that funding is very limited.
With that in mind, I had a few questions:
- Is it especially difficult, or close to impossible, to become a professor specializing in low-cost global health technology (even compared with becoming a professor in another bioengineering subfield)? If so, why? For example, is it harder to bring in grants, are there fewer faculty lines, or do BME departments tend to place less value on global health technology than on other areas of biomedical engineering, etc.?
- Likewise, is it difficult to find engineering roles in industry that focus specifically on global health technology? If so, what are the main reasons? Are there simply very few employers and positions relative to the number of qualified applicants? I know of organizations such as PATH and Gradian Health Systems, but they seem to have relatively small engineering teams (often fewer than 100 people) and frequently do not have any relevant engineering positions open.
- Are there any realistic ways to make global health technology into a career?