Raishma Anwar, a senior in biomedical engineering, was one of seven Purdue Engineering Fellows selected at the beginning of the fall semester. 

Raishma Anwar started her time at Purdue with “a good learning curve” and no idea how to find her way out.  

Anwar had grown up as a problem solver who would not – and could not – stop until a solution was implemented. Clear objectives made her process even faster.   

“My mom often would give me something that was tangled, like her necklace. It would take 20 minutes or so to untangle it. But once I was handed that, I couldn't put it down,” Anwar said.   

As a high school student, Anwar created Project Icarus with three friends to aid in educating unhoused populations about the risk of melanoma and provide them with preventative care; as she learned that melanoma was only one of many worries to someone without regular medical care, she began to work out solutions for that, too.  

“I see (a problem) and it feels like I have to do it. The hard part is figuring out the problem and finding the solution. Once you did that, you might as well just do the work.”   

The only Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering student represented in the Engineering Fellows class of 2025, Anwar has created an extensive legacy of advocacy, equity and inventiveness that will follow her into medical school and her professional career. Her pathway to excellence began with Project Icarus.  

Project Icarus had worked well in her hometown of Contra Costa County, California. West Lafayette proved to be a different challenge. When she struggled to get the general members to conduct a research project, something crucial to the project, Anwar knew she was in too deep.   

“It truly just failed and exploded in my face the first year,” Anwar said of the initial flop.  

Her journey to become a “stellar student” who made a “true impact” on Purdue, recognized as a Purdue Engineering Fellow as a senior in biomedical engineering, started with adapting Project Icarus into something college students could access. The club would not be able to help the unhoused in West Lafayette if they could not understand what they needed to do.    

Anwar realized she needed to develop better leadership skills and make a feasible, easily accessible club for Purdue students. So she began talking to faculty and getting involved in other leadership experiences. She started by joining the Caduceus Club in 2021.  

Her efforts were rewarded about a year later when Carl Russell III, the club’s president in 2022, asked the Caduceus members to propose ways to create a robust and organized library of medical books for students to access. After a quick email exchange where Anwar pitched her ideas, she became the club’s librarian. She purchased used but recent medical books, indexed them to be findable and set up an online checkout system so students could take and return the books with ease. Anwar served as treasurer the following academic year and became president of the club in 2023.   

As president, Anwar has worked to open opportunities for clinical shadowing and medical experiences to pre-health students, whether striving to become doctors, nurses or myriad of healthcare positions. But a glaring need pushed her to advocate for students in other spaces on campus: many pre-health students did not have consistent access to a car.   

Anwar has talked about Project Icarus at club fairs on campus.

Without consistent rides, it was difficult to complete shadow internships and gain relevant medical experience.  

Her first objective: create on-campus experiences for those without transportation. One opportunity that arose was manning phones and answering questions about vaccines to help students stay up to date on immunizations, especially medical students every fall. Purdue University Student Health (PUSH) needed some extra hands and Anwar had just the group of volunteers for the job.  

“Interacting with patients is considered a clinical experience, and so I noticed that PUSH had a real need for people who could answer phones and schedule vaccines,” Anwar said. “I knew a lot of students who would volunteer to do this because it would work well for their medical school applications.”    

Her efforts to get on-campus students access to clinical experiences are still a work in progress.   

When Anwar reapproached Project Icarus as a junior, now with organizational experience from being a club librarian, she had refreshed strategies and was ready to lead a larger team in aiding Greater Lafayette’s unhoused population. The club could do a lot, she realized. She just needed to chart a course that included more accessible milestones.  

“We started making small action items that club members could do in one meeting,” Anwar said. “Instead of us creating problems for our members to solve, we outsourced that part so we could focus on the education piece.”

The change proved wildly effective. Project Icarus became an active and consistent source of education and hygiene packages and clothing in Greater Lafayette and on Purdue’s campus, as has Anwar’s presence in the PUSH Student Advisory Board, Boilers in Action — which involves physical cleaning of litter-ridden locations among other service projects — and research labs.        

Anwar felt more confident as a leader by the time she joined Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) in the spring of her sophomore year. But her “trial by fire” experience as a design lead taught her about the nuances of leading a team, both as engineers and as people.   

She was assigned to a group of five by Asem Aboelzahab, the EPICS project advisor, without a set project. The team had to select a problem they could feasibly solve with limited resources, but the EPICS team had to make the decision together. Moreover, Anwar was selected to be the lead designer, a position typically best suited by experienced students who are familiar with the project or leading teams.   

While Anwar had certainly worked on a fair share of projects through clubs, leading an engineering team was a different experience. “Everyone had different strengths, different ideas, different routes that wanted to go down (with them). I had to learn to navigate working with people who had ideas and didn’t know how to voice them to the group … and navigate interpersonal problems that come with leading a team.”    

Anwar recalled near-weekly visits to Aboelzahab’s office, analyzing her actions and discussing how she could better handle team issues and creating a space for all voices to be heard.    

Anwar always has been someone who likes to solve problems. Her internship at Fogarty Innovation allowed her to work on stent.

The team chose to create a solution to aid nurses in placing feeding tubes effectively. Through the team’s collaboration and intense focus, they made a sound-playing device to help nurses track the device’s location after being placed inside a patient. 

According to Aboelzahab, who worked with Anwar for two years through EPICS, she has grown into a curious, confident and supportive leader.   

“Raishma has reciprocated the impact that Purdue has had on her with the service and impact she has had on Purdue,” he wrote when nominating Anwar for Engineering Fellows.  

There was still impact for Anwar to leave as she paved her way. Her 2023 internship with Fogerty Innovation in California laid every possible career path Anwar had been considering. With opportunities to explore medicine and engineering side by side, she was able to narrow down what kind of medical professional she wanted to be.     

“The experience rid me of a lot of uncertainty. They opened the door for me and let me do whatever I was curious about. It was a great experience for me to decide between engineering and medicine, especially in biomedical engineering.”  

Anwar’s love for solving problems veered away from engineering and into civic service suddenly in 2024. A professor told her that she could exponentially increase her impact as a doctor by going into policy and law,  and she could not imagine turning down a chance to help more people.  

Up until that conversation, Anwar had been set on a medical path. But true impact and powerful problem solving were two of her deepest desires as a student and a worker. What if she could do more as a representative?  

Anwar spent the summer of 2024 interning at the office of Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan in the California State Assembly. The sudden shift, right before her senior year, worried her family who had been watching her try a wide variety of careers and options before funneling down into biomedical engineering. An internship at the California State Assembly seemed to impossibly widen her future trajectories.   

But for Anwar, the experience was enlightening in a way she didn’t expect. She still wanted to be a doctor. She could help patients directly and provide medical expertise for court cases, satisfying her love for advocacy and engineering in the same career. Though Anwar never would have known unless she tried policy out for herself; she recommends students say “yes” to as many opportunities as they can because they may never know what can become a career.  

Anwar hopes students will remember that their future careers are decided by their actions, initiative and openness.    

“My mindset changed in terms of how to go about figuring out what I want for myself and my career,” Anwar said. “When I came into Purdue, I was looking for someone to tell me what to do. Throughout Purdue I realized that what I would do was decided by me.”  

Anwar’s next steps are certainly in her hands, supported by her mentors, peers and the generous $25,000 gift she receives upon graduation as an Engineering Fellow, set up by benefactors Robert H. Buckman (BSChE ’59) and wife Joyce A. Mollerup. She hopes to continue to cultivate her abilities as a leader to be an insightful clinician who helps evaluate accessible, efficient and comfortable medical devices.   

“Understanding what (my patients) are going through by being an advocate will not only help me understand where my patients are coming from, but every city has (these problems). Wherever I go next, I’ll know how to help,” Anwar said.  

When not creating solutions for socioeconomic, medical and transportation problems, Anwar focuses on studying and spending time with her friends on Purdue’s campus. She noted enjoying the pop-up events that frequently occur, such as “house shows,” informal shows featuring local or student bands.     

“There’s always something for me to do (at Purdue), which I appreciate,” Anwar said.    

She also serves as a resident assistant and a mentor for younger engineering students, helping them avoid pitfalls she found while narrowing down her interests and her future career.    

“(Mentoring) takes me back to who I was at the beginning of Purdue. I get to talk to students who are worried. It makes me think about how I got from where I was to where I am right now, and I tell them that they should do what they like doing. It’s been a really fulfilling experience and I hope they can go further and do more than I did.  

“I had all these opportunities in front of me and that realization did a good job of setting me up to experience what I needed to in order to figure out what I wanted to do in the future.”      

EPICS was a critical piece of Anwar's development at Purdue.