Charlotte Latin School, in partnership with Atrium Health’s Carolinas Rehabilitation and The Pearl innovation district, announced a new internship program for its students, designed to place its students at the center of medical research, technology, and patient care.

Tom Dubick, Chair of the Innovation and Design department and Director of the Fab Lab at Charlotte Latin, sees internships as the culmination of STEM education at Latin. He breaks the progression of engineering students into three phases: first, they learn fundamentals with projects like building robots out of Lego bricks, and then they move on to digital fabrication. “By the time students reach phase three, we think they’re ready to start working on real-world problems,” he says. 

While Latin has previously arranged internships in partnership with local tech companies, this new program will give students the hands-on opportunity to work specifically on issues of medical technology, including the development of assistive medical devices for patients and applying their data science skills to study treatment outcomes. Students will also be able to shadow medical clinicians and medical students to see how their devices work in the field, gaining firsthand clinical experience. And as The Pearl – a vibrant, one-of-its-kind ecosystem that sits at the crossroads of world-leading research, academic excellence, corporate innovation, clinical translation, entrepreneurial activity and community engagement – builds its own K-12 STEM Lab, Charlotte Latin will be working with it.

The program kicked off with a visit from Heather Smith of Atrium Health, introducing students to issues of assistive technology and universal design, prompting them to think of how they might apply their design skills to smart home appliances, phone apps, or even easier-to-wear sneakers. “One of the most powerful things about assistive technology is its ability to support real-life goals, things that matter deeply to the people using it,” she told four Latin students at a lunchtime meeting.

Those four students are taking the Advanced Topics in Engineering class this year: Scarlett Black ’26, Karlin Smith ’26, Caroline Uys ’26, and Marisol Wickham ’26. That class gives seniors the leeway to do in-depth work on more complicated engineering projects throughout the school year; the students will be fulfilling many of the class’s requirements this year through their internships, designing and manufacturing assistive devices for patients in wheelchairs. Atrium has a wishlist of items that its patients in wheelchairs need — some of which are available commercially, but at prices that make them unattainable, even though they can be life-changing.

They’ll be joined by classmates Aaron Dunnigan ’26 and Daniel Lokas ’26; all six of the seniors visited The Pearl this summer, accompanied by Dubick and Engineering Teacher Nidhie Dhiman. The seniors are also showing leadership by training underclassmen on how to create those devices.

“Charlotte has historically been a financial-tech town, but these groups want it to be a med-tech center,” Dubick says. “We’re already ranking Atrium’s design projects by need and complexity—the need is huge, and our students are extremely qualified to do this.”

Karlin Smith says that while both of her parents are doctors, she wasn’t interested in being a physician herself — “but being able to make things that help other people, I’m very excited.” Her interest was sparked by a personal project last year: she has a friend who is a para-athlete, but  who has difficulty wearing swimming fins when training in the pool because his feet are different shapes and sizes. “I made him a silicone insert for his fins, and now he uses it every day,” she reports proudly.

For her final engineering project last year, Caroline Uys worked on a mechanical arm to hold a cup: “It was fun to figure it out — I spent all summer thinking about it,” she says. A lot of the work she did previously on joints and mounts will pay off this year as the four students collaborate on Atrium’s wishlist of items. “I hope we can get as many of the projects done as possible,” she says; the group is already planning to devote their free periods to the project. “I would love to see them being used and help people have more independence.”

Dubick relates, “Two students came to me on the same day and told me that these internships had already changed their lives. That’s what you dream of hearing as a teacher — and in all these years, I had never had it happen twice in one day.”