CIMIT Global Health Initiative Program Leader Kristian Olson honored with President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and others in Scientific American Honor Roll

Scientific American has honored Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, DTM&H, Program Leader for the CIMIT Global Health Initiative, with inclusion in the Scientific American 10 honor roll. This award recognizes ten individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and accomplishment in applying new technologies and biomedical discoveries for the benefit of humanity.

Others on the Scientific American 10 honor roll include President Barack Obama, recognized for implementing policies to encourage scientific research; and Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg for their teamwork in building a global antismoking initiative.

Dr. Olson has done extensive work overseas including work in Aceh, Indonesia, Darfur, and the Thai-Burmese border.  Part of Dr. Olson’s work as CIMIT GHI’s program leader  focuses on implementing  simple, effective devices  in poor  countries. These devices  take advantage of local resources to create sustainable medical technologies where the device  acts as a catalyst for training and builds local capacity.

Among the projects recognized by Scientific American is the “Car Part” Incubator, a neonatal incubator where all the replaceable parts are made from locally available material in poor countries such as car parts. Another major initiative initiated by Dr. Olson and his Global Health Initiative collaborators is a training program in Indonesia to teach midwives how to use a low-cost, simple resuscitator for asphyxiated newborns.  By training midwives how to teach others to use a commercially available tube and mask device called the  Tekno-Tube, more village based midwives can help save newborns; asphyxia causes 1 million neonatal deaths annually world wide. 

CIMIT Global Health Initiative (GHI) seeks to improve the effectiveness of healthcare providers in low-income settings by developing and implementing sustainable technologies and targeted training . GHI focus is in the areas of maternal and child health, global health diagnostics and communicable diseases.   Collaborating organizations include Global Health Committee (GHC), Harvard Initiative in Global Health (HIGH), Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), International Organization of Migration (IOM),  MIT Innovations in International Health (IIH), and Design that Matters.

CIMIT (Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology) fosters and nurtures interdisciplinary collaboration among world-class experts in medicine, science and engineering, in concert with industry and government, to rapidly improve patient care. A non-profit consortium of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, CIMIT provides innovators with resources to explore, develop and implement novel technological solutions for today’s most urgent healthcare problems.