Jenna Hook, a 2005 graduate of Westlake High School and a recent graduate of Rice University, received the 2009 service award from the university’s bioengineering department.

Hook’s selection for the honor was partly based on her being instrumental in developing the department’s renowned “lab-in-a-backpack” as a student in Rice 360’s Beyond Traditional Borders global health initiative program. Rice 360 is dedicated to introducing low-cost, high-performance health technologies in communities around the world.

Hook said the lab-in-a-backpack allows people living in remote regions access to medical treatment by acting as a mini medical clinic, which doctors can strap onto their backs to have easy access to everything from basic medical supplies to complex instruments used for testing and treating various conditions to basic medical supplies.

“For doctors who have to trek miles through regions with no roads to reach patients too sick to leave home, it can be indispensable,” says Hook, who helped test the backpack in the summer of 2008 in Lesotho, Africa.

Because many of the complex instruments used for testing and treating various conditions require electricity, it also includes a portable renewable energy source.

“Another cool thing about the lab-in-a-backpack is that it can run off of solar power, so if you’re in the middle of nowhere you can recharge all of the battery operating devices,” says Hook.

Rice’s kit has inspired several spin-offs, including an OBGYN-in-a-backpack and a dental lab-in-a-backpack, and has been used by the Baylor College of Medicine to treat thousands of patients in Honduras.

The Ecuadorian government recently ordered a trial run of the lab-in-a-backpack, with the intent of ordering 1,000 or more if it is successful.

Hook was selected for the Rice service award based on her contributions to the lab-in-a-backpack project as well as her service to Rice University as a mentor for Martel College, the Habitat for Humanity campus organization and a variety of other campus programs.

Starting in the fall of 2009, she will be pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Duke University in Durham, N.C.