Student-run Martha’s Clinic receives Rotary grant

Students from the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine have received a $14,000 matching grant from The Rotary Foundation and the Rotary clubs in Temple and Monterrey, Mexico, to purchase new equipment and improve the level of care at Martha’s Clinic.

Founded in 1994 by two College of Medicine students, Martha's Clinic is a student-run free health clinic for the homeless and indigent population of Temple and surrounding Bell County.

The clinic, which operates solely on grant funding and donations, serves more than 125 people per month and is staffed by volunteer medical students and local community physicians.

Grant will create an “immediate impact”

As part of the award from the Rotary groups, students plan to purchase a diagnostic EKG machine, external automatic defibrillator and other medical equipment for the clinic.

“The number of uninsured residents of the United States, particularly Texas, and more specifically the community of Temple, is overwhelming,” said fourth-year medical student and Martha’s Clinic co-director Lam Le. “The grant by the Rotary Club will allow us to furnish our examination rooms with much-needed equipment. It will create an immediate impact on the quality of care our students and faculty provide to patients of the clinic.”

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Texas A&M Engineering professor designs space habitat

Engineering professor William Schneider is busy these days in his classroom at Texas A&M University, but his mind sometimes wanders to a place about 300 miles straight up.

That's where a new kind of spacecraft he designed and helped build floats in orbit not far from the International Space Station. Shaped like a fat sausage, the 14-foot-long vehicle is the first step toward what its sponsor, Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas, Nev., hopes will be a space habitat that can be used for anything from producing high-quality pharmaceuticals to housing "space tourists" of the future.

Schneider designed the inflatable spacecraft (then known as TransHab) in 1997, while he was a senior engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. TransHab was one of several designs being developed for use during exploratory missions to Mars, but the project was cancelled in 2000, shortly after Schneider retired from NASA and joined the Texas A&M engineering faculty.

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