Photo above: Alyssa Schul, right, with Premera’s Meghan Quint
UW Bioengineering graduate student Alyssa Schul took home the $1,000 Premera Grand Prize at UW’s 2020 Science and Technology Showcase Jan. 29. Alyssa’s innovation addresses the need for improved training on how to safely insert a urinary catheter. She developed the CREST Urethral Catheter Simulator, a hyper-realistic device for hands-on, high-quality education training to prevent traumatic urethral catheter-related injuries. An estimated 30 million indwelling urethral catheters are sold annually in the United States, and approximately 20% of hospitalized patients have a urethral catheter at any given time, according to a recent report.
Judges also awarded Alyssa a $100 Davis Wright Tremaine Best Communicator Prize at the 14th annual competition co-hosted by the Science and Engineering Business Association (SEBA) and the Foster School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship.
To read the Foster School’s article about all the winners, visit: https://blog.foster.uw.edu/2020-science-technology-showcase/