UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Conrad Tucker, associate professor of engineering design and industrial and manufacturing engineering, was invited by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to attend the Gates Millennium Scholars Program Celebration on April 24 in Seattle.
Although there are more than 20,000 Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS) and alumni of the program, Tucker was one of only approximately 30 scholars invited to the event, which was held at the BMGF Discovery Center.
“It was a humbling and honoring experience to have been selected out of so many highly successful individuals. To dine with Bill and Melinda in such a small, intimate setting is an experience that I will cherish forever,” said Tucker.
According to the BMGF website, the organization is “dedicated to improving the quality of life for individuals around the world.” The foundation’s areas of interest — including access to education and health care — offer the opportunity to dramatically improve the quality of life for billions of people around the world.
While networking at the event, Tucker had the opportunity to discuss some of the work he is doing as the director of Penn State’s Center for Health Organization Transformation. One of the initiatives he discussed is his research on using non-contact methods to estimate patients’ heart rate, along with other measurable — and innovative — health care solutions that are aligned with the goals of the BMGF.
“If we’re going to truly broaden access to high-quality health care and education, we need to have affordable and scalable ways of interacting with the end user,” said Tucker. “Mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous, both in developed and developing nations. By leveraging these technologies that people already have in their pockets, our goal is to enable affordable, real-time detection of diseases that manifest themselves through visual inspection.”
“We’re currently developing computer vision algorithms that are capable of ‘seeing’ what would otherwise be unobservable to the human eye,” he continued.