A student fiddles with a smartwatch designed to prevent accidentally slicing off a finger while cooking. Another compares organic materials that will be turned into compostable single-use packaging. Sarah Fletcher ’25 AM and her team work on an external menstrual blood collection device. Their goal? Create a product that can help detect conditions like cervical cancer and endometriosis. The projects are some of many under development in Brown|RISD Master of Arts in Design Engineering (MADE) program. 

Brought together by a shared passion for women’s health, Fletcher’s group comes from an array of academic backgrounds. “When you are working on a problem, everybody comes at it from slightly different angles, and it just makes for a better solution,” she says.  

This cross-disciplinary collaboration defines the program’s pedagogical approach, says Louise Manfredi, director of the Brown Design Workshop and associate professor of engineering. The program’s curriculum, specifically the studio component, is designed to equip students to “build bridges across these disciplines and learn to speak the language of some of these other disciplines,” says MADE founding executive director and engineering professor of the practice Beth Altringer-Eagle.

For Fletcher, the cohort is instrumental. “I will go to my friends in the program who have graphic design experience and they help me with [Adobe] Illustrator and Photoshop. I’ve learned a lot of what I know now because of people in our class.”

Through their collaboration, Fletcher’s team hopes to transform women’s health. “We are really excited about being at that forefront,” she says.