Posted on November 5, 2026 by Sean M. Wood
The first few minutes of care an emergency room patient receives can determine their chance of survival. The odds get worse if they can’t breathe. For a decade, two UT San Antonio faculty members — an engineer and an emergency physician — have worked to give first responders better tools for those minutes.
Lyle Hood and Robert De Lorenzo
The first few minutes of care an emergency room patient receives can determine their chance of survival. The odds get worse if they can’t breathe. For a decade, two UT San Antonio faculty members — an engineer and an emergency physician — have worked to give first responders better tools for those minutes.
R. Lyle Hood, Associate Professor of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Industrial Engineering in the Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design, and Robert De Lorenzo, Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Long School of Medicine, Department of Emergency Medicine, have built a model for how cross-discipline collaboration can work: clinicians defining the problems, engineers building the solutions and students learning at the intersection.
“Rob and I immediately recognized each other as the type of person that followed through and got stuff done,” Hood said.
De Lorenzo came to San Antonio from the Army, where he helped revamp its combat medic program. In 2015, he took the job of building the research program in the department of emergency medicine.
“My interest was creating devices that would help combat medics,” he said. He set out to tackle practical problems that he believed weren’t getting the attention they needed.
That search led him to Hood. “He was looking for an engineer, and he had this vision of airway management that he’d already been working on for a very long time,” Hood said. “I became the engineer who helped create the devices to address the needs he had seen in the field.”
Airway management is vital in emergency medical care, but developing devices for it hasn’t been treated as a research priority, according to De Lorenzo.
“Early interventions, even relatively modest ones, can have a big impact on survival,” DeLorenzo said. “This is a big problem in emergency care. Airway management is not easy. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of training and a lot of high-tech equipment to make it all happen.”
Benefit for students
To tackle these problems, Hood challenges students at the UT San Antonio Medical Design Innovations Laboratory to design devices emergency responders can use, regardless of experience or training.
“We focus on technology and people equally,” Hood said. “We see the students as important research outputs, so we invest heavily in them.”
Graduate researcher Jacob Provencio has spent more than three years developing a novel endotracheal tube system. The project earned a 2025 Hill Prize for technology, which provides seed funding to carry the work forward.
“That’s going to pay him to get his doctorate,” Hood said. “The impact and benefit for the students involved is huge.”
For engineering students in the lab, working alongside a seasoned emergency physician is invaluable.
“I have a very strong foundation of airway management because of him,” Provencio said. “If I develop a device without the insight from Dr. De Lorenzo, or that type of individual, then I would not know whether the device I create is useful.”
Breaking barriers
The benefit runs both ways. While students learn from a practicing clinician, Hood and De Lorenzo draw on the students’ ingenuity.
“They have incredible imagination,” De Lorenzo said. “I’ve got this mindset of how I think things should work. But there’s a whole world of solutions out there that I’m not thinking about. We want them to go to the moon.”
Both men hope their partnership encourages colleagues across UT San Antonio to look beyond their own disciplines for collaborators.
“We showed that there’s a real need,” De Lorenzo said. “If you really want great research in this community, you’re going to have to break down the barriers.”
— Sean M. Wood
Explore Further
• Learn more about the prestigious 2025 Hill Prize for medicine and technology.
• Visit the Medical Design Innovations Laboratory to see more of its work.
• Visit the Research page of the Department of Emergency Medicine to find out more exciting research.
• Learn more about the prestigious 2025 Hill Prize for medicine and technology.
• Visit the Medical Design Innovations Laboratory to see more of its work.
• Visit the Research page of the Department of Emergency Medicine to find out more exciting research.
