Future Health Innovators Summer Camp 

Future health leaders: Students, mentors, and program organizers gather to celebrate a week of collaborative biosensing innovation at the University of Minnesota.

For most high school students, summer vacation is a time to step away from textbooks. But from July 6 to July 10, 2026, the University of Minnesota’s (UMN) East Bank campus became a bustling, hands-on laboratory. Approximately 60 high school students gathered on campus, arriving from the Power of People Learning Institute’s Girls Taking Action program, the Minnesota STEM Partnership, and several local schools. They weren't there to take notes, they were there to transition from classroom learners into active inventors.

Hosted by the University’s International Institute for Biosensing (IIB), the "Future Health Innovators" summer camp challenged students to solve real-world medical and environmental crises using advanced sensors, supercomputing, and human-centered design thinking. To make it happen, a diverse coalition of industry, non-profit, and academic partners stepped up to design custom challenges, supply raw materials, and mentor the students throughout the week.

“Biosensing is the ultimate superpower—it is the art and engineering of listening to the invisible signals to save lives and protect our planet,” Patricia Khashayar, director of the IIB, told the students as they arrived. “My challenge to you is simple: dive in with fearless curiosity. Use every experiment, every row of code, and every massive data stream to discover what truly ignites your passion.”  

Empathy First: Grounding Science in Human Need

The program’s core philosophy—Explore → Build → Innovate—began not with circuit boards, but with human stories. Before writing a single line of code, students set out to understand the "why" behind the technology. The camp was built around four critical challenges that impact daily life: water quality, air quality, cardiovascular health, and wound care. The goal was to deeply understand the negative impacts of these issues, design realistic solutions to overcome them, and figure out how to analyze the scientific data they would soon collect.

Working alongside academic and industry mentors, students examined the real-world consequences of these environmental and health conditions. In the environmental track, they analyzed groundwater quality and studied local air diagnostics with the support of experts from UMN and Solventum, while visiting "wizards" from 3M brought the concepts to life with interactive, hands-on demonstrations. On the clinical side, experts from UMN and the University of Victoria helped students map out the practical realities of patient care, investigating how surgical wound infections develop and how cardiovascular stress impacts the body.

To understand the day-to-day frustrations of healthcare providers and environmental scientists, students teamed up with Fathom Consulting for an interactive empathy-mapping workshop. This exercise pushed them to look past the technical specs and put themselves in the shoes of their end users. By learning how to design with the "human factor" in mind, the students ensured their final prototypes would be both technologically viable and deeply human-centric.

Stronger together: A student team pauses for a photo during a collaborative group design session on the UMN campus. Photo credit: Shelly Gustafson

Getting Hands-on with the Tools of Detection

With a concrete understanding of the challenges—and after learning about real-world public health shortcomings from the Minnesota Department of Health—the students moved from theory to creation, getting their hands dirty with hardware prototyping.  

In the clinical working groups, students partnered with two medical technology teams from Solventum and students from Century College to build physical prototypes, including wearable heart-rate monitors and thermal sensors designed for smart bandages. By learning how electrical currents flow through breadboards and microcontrollers, the high schoolers successfully assembled operational hardware to track real-time heart rates and monitor active wound healing.

Simultaneously, the environmental track headed outdoors to become "citizen scientists." Equipped with low-cost test strips and supervised by experts from the UMN Edgar Lab, MNanalytics, and U-Spatial, students sampled water from nearby Minnehaha Creek, analyzed the samples for pollutants, and uploaded their findings to U-Spatial's ArcGIS Survey123 mapping platform. By visualizing real-time contamination levels across the Twin Cities, raw field data can directly shape regional health policies.

Meanwhile, the air quality group tackled environmental health indoors. Collaborating with the Inspire Change Clinic, they designed and built their own custom air purifiers, equipping them with sensitive air quality sensors to monitor and clean the air around them.

Measuring clean air: Students and a mentor collaborate to test a custom-built air purifier, tracking its real-time performance using a digital air quality sensor. 

Beyond the Classroom: Campus Expeditions

The middle of the week took the young innovators out into the University’s most advanced research corridors. Students rotated through several of UMN’s premier laboratories to see how academic research scales into world-changing technology.

They toured the Minnesota NanoCenter and the McAlpine Tissue Mechanics Laboratory to observe how micro-scale biosensors, 3D-printed biological tissues, and bio-electronics are fabricated. The students also got up close with cutting-edge technology at the Minnesota Robotics Institute and toured the university's chemistry labs, giving them a vivid look at where future STEM careers could take them.

Suited up for science: Students don full cleanroom protective gear during an immersive tour of the Minnesota NanoCenter on the UMN campus.

Data Cracking and the Art of Collaboration 

That high-tech exposure quickly translated into practical application the following day. Working with software mentors from YouthAI Lab, students became "data detectives". They learned how to write basic algorithms to interpret simulated vital signs and extract meaningful trends from raw sensor feeds—mimicking the exact type of data they would collect from the physical sensors they built earlier in the week.

Because breakthroughs in modern science are rarely achieved in isolation, the camp placed a major emphasis on teamwork. In an afternoon challenge hosted by Seagate, students jumped into hands-on coordination games designed to test their communication skills under pressure.

In "The Art of Communication," blindfolded students had to sort waste categories using only verbal cues from their teammates. In another challenge, "The Tower Builders' Mini Quest," teams had to navigate the classic stages of team dynamics—from forming to performing—to build structural towers from simple materials under a tight deadline. Through these exercises, students not only learned the value of trust and critical thinking, but they also navigated real-world project challenges like supply shortages, tight time limits, and the fast-paced nature of production cycles.

Communication is key: A blindfolded student relies on her teammates' verbal guidance to navigate a process engineering and workflow challenge. 

Putting Ideas to the Test: The Showcase Pitch

By Friday, the classroom-turned-laboratory was charged with anticipation as students put the final touches on their technical prototypes for "The Grand Pitch". This final showcase was the ultimate test of the students' scientific storytelling. Teams stood before their peers and an esteemed panel of university researchers, community leaders, and industry executives to pitch their diagnostic solutions.

Putting theory into practice: Students demonstrate their smart bandage prototype during the final presentations, using a mentor as a simulated patient. Photo credit: Sophia Dagnello

Constructive feedback: Jay Shahidi shares insights and evaluates student presentations during the Grand Pitch showcase. Photo credit: Sophia Dagnello

To celebrate the students' technical achievements, the judges evaluated the projects and presented the highly anticipated category awards to the top-performing teams:

• Water Quality (The Aquifer Architect Award): Recognizing outstanding engineering and analytical mapping of creek pollutants. 
• Air Quality (The Atmospheric Ace Award): Celebrating innovative, human-centric design in environmental diagnostic sensors.
• Cardiovascular Stress (The Cardiac Commander Award): Honoring the most practical, cohesive, and wearable design for a health patch.
• Wound Infections (The Pathogen Pathbreaker Award): Awarded to the team with the most promising thermal sensor solution for post-surgical wound care.

Celebrating technical achievement: Students receive the Cardiac Commander Award for their wearable health patch prototypes from Patricia Khashayar during the Grand Pitch showcase on the final day of the workshop. Photo credit: Shelly Gustafson

STEM Saturday: Mentoring the Next Generation

While the formal workshop concluded on Friday, the students' journey came full circle the following morning. On Saturday, July 11, the newly minted health innovators traveled to the Agape Early Learning Center in Minneapolis for a "Pay-It-Forward" STEM Saturday, sponsored by OIC of America.

Transitioning from students to mentors, the high schoolers spent their morning guiding younger K–2 and 3–8 grade children through basic engineering challenges. Together, they built simple water filtration setups and sketched out imaginative concepts for futuristic health-monitoring tools. 

By guiding these younger kids, the high school students did more than just teach—they stepped into their own identities as leaders in STEM. The transition from being mentored to mentoring others underscored the ultimate vision of the program. As Dawn Muyers, Front End Innovation officer at Solventum and a core organizer to the summer camp, noted, this intensive week was designed to be a launchpad, not a final destination: “Let this immersive experience serve as your compass, helping to choose your future pathways.”