Carle Illinois College of Medicine student Nellie Haug has been chosen as the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Fiddler Innovation Fellowship. The award recognizes Haug as a health care innovator, leveraging medicine and her engineering background to develop patient-centered solutions, including a new at-home cervical cancer screening test.
Haug is completing her second year at CI MED, having earned a degree in mechanical engineering from The Grainger College of Engineering. During both her undergraduate career and in medical school, Haug has taken on projects to innovate and design new devices to advance health care. “I believe what set me apart was my work with Cervicare,” Haug said. She co-founded the startup with Bhargavee Gnanasambandam to address the diagnostic aspect of cervical cancer.
The team’s solution is a tampon-like sample collection system that is more comfortable, more affordable, and more accessible than the gold-standard Pap test. “With a mechanical engineering background, I oversaw and contributed to the design of this novel collection system, the most critical component enabling increased access to screening for a preventable disease that still claims the lives of nearly 350,000 women globally,” she said.
CI MED Professor Amy Wagoner Johnson cited Haug’s commitment to providing innovative and equitable solutions for underserved patient populations in nominating her for the fellowship. “Not only is Nellie targeting the issue of gender inequality in health care within this project, but she is focusing simultaneously on the intersection of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and locational barriers, thus finding a solution that gives all women increased access to better health care,” wrote Wagoner Johnson, who is also head of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at CI MED and a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.
The Fiddler Innovation Fellowship comes with an award of $10,000 and a trophy. Haug says she plans to continue to work on Cervicare while also pursuing new projects to advance health care. “The funding will provide essential resources for research, development, and collaboration, enabling me to further my impact on health care innovation,” Haug said. One of those other projects is an innovation called AmnioSense, a new pH-sensitive undergarment liner designed to provide expectant women a clear indicator of labor onset. Co-founded with Tessabella Magliochetti Cammarata and Bhargavee Gnanasambandam, the AmnioSense team advanced to the final round of the 2024 Cozad New Venture Challenge, winning an investment of $10,000.
After medical school, Haug anticipates a career that embraces the role of physician-innovator. “I want to be the amazing, caring doctor that someone tells their family and friends about,” Haug said. “I also hope to integrate my passion for engineering and innovation into my practice, particularly in device design.”
The Fiddler Innovation Fellowship honors University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign undergraduate and graduate students for excellence in addressing cultural, societal, or global challenges with innovative solutions that have the potential to make a significant impact and incorporate the interdisciplinary areas of creativity, art or design, and technology.
CI MED student Jermaine Chambers was a finalist for this year’s Fiddler Innovation Fellowship. MD/PhD Candidate Al Smith was a finalist for the Illinois Innovation Award, sponsored by The Grainger College of Engineering and administered through the Technology Entrepreneur Center at Illinois.
Past CI MED recipients include Bara Sadaah, MD, the 2023 recipient, and Ariana Barreau (MD Class of 2024), who was chosen for the Fiddler Innovation fellowship in 2021. Sadaah helped develop a special vest for surgeons to reduce fatigue and provide muscle relief. Barreau co-founded ProteCKD, a chronic kidney disease (CKD) pre-screening program that aims to reduce racial disparities in renal care and health expenditures in CKD care. She also co-founded AxisMed, a health care innovation pre-incubator.
The Fiddler Innovation Fellowship is awarded by the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute, which is endowed by Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden. eDream is based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).