Interdisciplinary
15+ majors and minors
FISH brings together students with different academic backgrounds to build stronger, more thoughtful solutions.
Frugal
Innovations in
Sustainable
Healthcare
FISH at UVA is a student-led organization focused on frugal, sustainable healthcare innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration, hands-on design, and community-rooted problem solving.
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Our Mission
Designing practical healthcare solutions with sustainability, accessibility, and real-world use in mind.
We partner with physicians, researchers, and healthcare professionals to turn real-world problems into practical, cost-effective solutions.
Our team brings together students from engineering, public health, data science, and the College of Arts and Sciences to approach healthcare challenges from multiple perspectives.
Community-rooted
Real challenges
Projects begin with problems faced by patients, practitioners, and partners in the healthcare community.
Hands-on
Design to prototype
Members move beyond ideas into research, prototyping, testing, and iterative improvement.
What Drives Us
A shared approach to innovation.
Patient-centered
We focus on problems that matter to real people and design with usability, context, and impact in mind.
Frugal & sustainable
We aim to create maximum value with minimal resources, building solutions that are practical, scalable, and durable.
Interdisciplinary
The best ideas come from different perspectives. We combine engineering, medicine, public health, and more to solve problems holistically.
How It Works
From challenge to solution.
We start by understanding real pain points in healthcare settings, then move through collaborative research, brainstorming, prototyping, and testing. Throughout the process, we work closely with physicians, faculty, and community partners to make sure the final result is not only innovative, but useful and sustainable in practice.
01
Share the challenge
We begin with a real problem or unmet need in healthcare.
02
Research and define
We learn from users, partners, and context before shaping a direction.
03
Prototype and test
Ideas become tangible through design work, feedback, and iteration.
04
Refine collaboratively
We keep improving with input from the people the solution is meant to serve.
Beyond Projects
A club built around learning, building, and community.
Workshops
Hands-on sessions help members build skills across design, engineering, medicine, and healthcare innovation.
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Guest Speakers
Professionals across medicine, engineering, and entrepreneurship share insight into real careers and real problems.
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Competitions
Members collaborate on ambitious design challenges and represent FISH in competitions beyond UVA.
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Community
FISH is also a place to meet collaborators, build friendships, and grow alongside people who care about meaningful innovation.
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Build with us.
Whether you are interested in medicine, engineering, research, prototyping, outreach, or design, there is a place for you in FISH.
Charlottesville, VA, 22904
