My teaching and research focuses on using a project-based approach to introduce students to engineering design challenges and biomaterial fabrication. I teach the junior level biomedical engineering design course, challenging students to design, prototype, and test a device to solve a real-world problem. Over the last two years, students have worked to increase the quantity and quality of harvested umbilical cord blood, inexpensively and reproducibly diagnose a malarial infection, or create a method to culture bacterial samples in rural Namibia. These projects are open ended and serve to teach the students the design process while also generating potential solutions to currently unsolved problems. The malarial diagnosis project resulted in several potentially viable designs which will be further evaluated by senior students in the upcoming year and the bacterial culture project is being continued by interested junior students.