Even before she set foot on campus, Paula Ayala had a role model at Rice University — a prominent professor of bioengineering.
“She is a celebrity, which is kind of unusual for someone who’s an engineer," said Ayala, an undergraduate majoring in bioengineering with a minor in global health technologies. "She makes technologies that help people, and that’s what I want to do."
The faculty member serves as a distinguished university professor and director of the global health institute. Ayala spent a summer on an international internship developing medical devices in South America.
While abroad, she worked at a specialized healthcare center, interviewing patients and medical practitioners. She and a partner designed and coded a mobile application to simplify communications between patients in rural areas and doctors at the main facility. “By the end I felt so proud to be Latina,” she said.
Ayala wrote regular updates describing her experiences at the hospital. In the operating room, she witnessed her first medical procedure on a patient with cancer. She nearly fainted. In an update, she writes:
“The link between shadowing surgeries and my prospects of being a good engineer seemed pretty simple to me. I want to design medical technologies — some of which would be used on open flesh. Therefore, I need to see open flesh to know what to design. If I can’t sit through an operation, what good am I to a design team or to a patient? And while some might argue that that’s not the case at all, unfortunately, it’s a mantra I’ve repeated for years.”
Medical staff came to her aid and shared their own early experiences. She adds:
“I went from almost crying from embarrassment to almost crying from gratitude. Things had not gone according to plan. In that moment I decided to stop dwelling on something that was out of my control and focus on how far I had come and how much I had learned through it all.”
Ayala straddles cultures, nationalities, and languages. She was born in a border town in Texas. Her mother was Colombian, her father Mexican, and both are engineers, as is her maternal grandfather. The family moved frequently during her childhood, living in multiple regions including Oklahoma, South America, and Houston. Her mother has since founded an energy startup. Ayala speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese fluently, and has a conversational command of French.
During her studies, she developed a computational model of the human organ system. In the campus engineering design kitchen, she led a student design team working on a device to monitor organ function in patients with chronic medical conditions.
As a research intern at the bioscience collaborative, Ayala designed and tested working diagnostic tests for detecting maternal health complications in low-resource clinics.
Along with her academic work, Ayala serves as internal affairs chair for the university chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, and as public affairs chair of the campus Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. She is also a student athletic leader on campus.
“Being an enthusiastic leader is important,” she said. “That’s something else I’ve learned thanks to the opportunities Rice has given me.”