PROFILE
Nabeel Vandayer has developed a ‘speech filter’ for stuttered speech that delivers a fluent voice to the listener.
ENGINEERING EMPATHY
In search of ways to help his father recover from injuries suffered in a motorbike accident, Nabeel Vandayar enrolled at Wits to study medicine, but soon switched to biomedical engineering after realising that this field holds promising solutions to his father’s speech and mobility challenges. DEBORAH MINORS
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SHIVAN PARUSNATH
he field of biomedical engineering would be poorer if Nabeel Vandayar, 26, had pursued his boyhood passion for cricket rather than medicine. The promising Gauteng Schools batsman matriculated from Jeppe Boys High – where he “took far too many extra subjects!” – and enrolled at Wits in 2013 for the MBBCh degree. “The reason I chose medicine was personal,” says Vandayar – his father had been left partially disabled after a motorbike accident in 2011.
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MORE THAN MEDICINE
“By the end of my first year of medicine, my father had made a significant recovery after months of rehabilitation, but I realised then that medicine can only do so much,” says Vandayar. “There’s certain things that medicine cannot do. My Dad still couldn’t ride his bike, for example, and medicine couldn’t give him the quality of life he enjoyed before the accident.” Vandayar finished first-year medicine and then switched to the School of Electrical and Information Engineering to study biomedical engineering.
