Kai Do is a rising junior at Columbia studying Mechanical Engineering with interests in medical technology, rehabilitation engineering, and human-centered design. Her interest in healthcare began after observing how geographical, economic, and other identity-based barriers shape access to care and influence health outcomes. Currently, Kai works at Blythedale Children’s Hospital as a Rehabilitation Engineering Intern, developing assistive technology for pediatric patients. She strongly believes that empathy and social understanding are essential to effective engineering, striving to integrate social research with medical and technical experimentation.

During the Social Impact Fellowship, she aims to explore an engineer’s role in the social sector, beyond recognizing a problem and creating a solution. Through cross-discipline discussion, she hopes to use social understanding to translate complex needs into functional hardware, where combining technical skills with awareness of nuanced societal issues will allow her to create tangible solutions that can truly serve the community in the future.