Sara Belko

Sara Belko is a Research Fellow and medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University (TJU). Sara earned a MS and BSE in Biomedical engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). She then worked at Medtronic, Inc. as a product and operations quality engineer for their pacemakers, cardiac monitors, and neurostimulators. Working in TJU's Health Design Lab, her research interests focus on the intersection of medicine, engineering and design thinking. She is a recipient of the Dean’s Student Research Award and the Helen and Gabriel Lavine Scholarship Award. Sara has a passion for mentoring and education. She mentors capstone senior engineering design teams at ASU on clinical needs, design processes, and prototyping. She works on a TJU academic committee examining the medical school curriculum through the lens of disability to improve student’s competency to care for people with disabilities. Sara was an invited speaker to teach medical students the art of prototyping and pitching their design projects. She worked as an anatomy teaching assistant where she taught undergraduate students human systems with human gifts. Sara is determined to improve healthcare by advancing the collaboration between the fields of medicine, engineering, education, and design.