Avinash Konkani is awarded prestigious graduate student scholarship

Systems Engineering graduate student Avinash Konkani has been awarded the Michael J. Miller Scholarship for the year 2012 from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI). Only two recipients were awarded this scholarship throughout the USA. The Scholarship will be presented at the AAMI’s National Conference and Expo, to be held June 2-4 at the Charlotte Convention Center, in Charlotte, North Carolina. An article in the AAMI News (June 2012) announced the scholarship winners.

"Nearly halfway through a five-year PhD program, Konkani says he wants to be a human factors specialist in a hospital or in the device industry. ‘I want to apply human factors in hospitals to make the working environment with medical devices so simple that risk can be reduced,’ he says. ‘Everything comes back to patient safety.’"

Konkani works with Associate Professor Barbara Oakley, of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, on a project to reduce noise levels in the pediatric intensive care unit at Beaumont Hospital, funded in part by a 2011 OU-Beaumont Multidisciplinary Research Award. Konkani and Oakley have an article in press in the Journal of Critical Care titled Noise in Hospital Intensive Care Units: A Critical Review of a Critical Topic. A poster about this research was presented at the CBR research festival last month. Before joining OU, Konkani worked as an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Trident Academy of Technology, a private engineering college in Bhubaneswar, India.