Maria Oden

Maria Oden has 25+ years of combined academic, research, and clinical experience in biomedical engineering and engineering design. This solid background has been foundational to her leadership in biomedical engineering and use of engineering education to teach students to identify, innovate, and build devices and technologies that solve real-world problems. Oden fosters growth in student impact-driven design education including technologies to address health challenges identified by colleagues and clinical partners around the world.
Maria Oden co-founded a novel, inter-institutional program to advance invention education (IvE), to improve healthcare and economies by establishing local ecosystems that foster technical innovation and entrepreneurship. The growing IvE program network, of seven African universities and Rice360, teaches a product development process to create high-impact technologies that address critical health gaps impacting their communities. IvE recently launched a public IvE implementation toolkit website.