KEEN 2020 Annual Report

8 barrier for me.” Coming from engineering backgrounds, many faculty engaged with KEEN are entrepreneurial around their teaching and research, trying new approaches that meet student needs. When creating course-related experiences for students to develop EM and encouraging them to un- derstand opportunity and impact, Rust found these were good lessons for himself as well. “I learned to be curious and to make fifty calls to poten- tial customers to discuss our technology. We’d made as- sumptions that we knew what we were doing, but there’s no substitute for talking to a customer and hearing what they liked and didn’t like. We were thinking of all folks SPOTLIGHT ON COMMUNITY KEEN Helps Provide the Means to Succeed What do KEEN, entrepreneurial mindset (EM), and the 3C’s (curiosity, connections, and creating value) have to do with dramatically changing home diabetes tests for the better? Dr. Mike Rust, associate professor at Western New England University (WNE), can tell you. One of the reasons for diabetic complications is that up to half of all diabetics do not strictly follow the daily procedures. Pain and inconvenience are likely reasons for this: people with diabetes have to test the glucose levels in their blood using an invasive, moderately painful pro- cedure requiring a blood sample from one of their fingers using a lancet. This procedure has to be repeated four to twelve times a day, every day, for the rest of the person’s life. Knowing of these negative issues and reading reports suggesting a correlation between acetone in a person’s breath and the person’s level of blood glucose, Rust con- ceived of a noninvasive, painless, easy to perform breath test to measure blood glucose levels. This idea started Rust on his own entrepreneurial journey. Rust co-founded a company (Breath Health) to help move his idea into the hands of patients. The business wouldn’t have happened without Rust’s experience as a KEEN Leader on the WNE campus. “Because of KEEN, I had the confidence and comfort level from my teaching to under- stand how to identify an opportunity, think about market impact, and find a path forward. It lowered the entropy Dr. Ronny Priefer and Dr. Michael Rust, both from Western New En- gland University in Springfield, Massachusetts discovered a novel approach to detect levels of glucose in the blood using breath. This patented nanotechnology is in early phase testing and if success- ful, will result in the first non-invasive glucose detector. Dr. Maria-Isabel Carnasciali https://engineeringunleashed.com/profile/view/1924 Dr. Stephanie Gillespie https://engineeringunleashed.com/profile/view/2557 Dr. Goli Nossoni https://engineeringunleashed.com/profile/view/1037 (Continued from page 7) no microcontrollers, laser cutters, and hand tools, and learned how to operate the 3D printers. Gillespie explains, “Using the makerspace, students were responsible for all the elements of the project, not just the design portion. They now know how to implement a design from idea to fabrication.” UNH KEEN leader, Dr. Maria-Isabel Carnasciali, says, “The workshops were instrumental in onboarding the faculty members who were then embedded into their individual technical disciplines as EML Champions. This helps raise the visibility of KEEN, gets EML into the daily language, and helps attract additional faculty into the EML culture.”