Drexel University

06/24/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/24/2026 12:46

Custom-Designed Major Student Creates Own Major, Accessible Cutting Board

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Custom-Designed Major Student Creates Own Major, Accessible Cutting Board

Lelia Karmeli wanted to blend multiple disciplines into her custom "make things and help people" degree.
June 24, 2026

Karmeli's cutting board includes various attachments. Photo courtesy of Lelia Karmeli.

When Lelia Karmeli, custom-designed major '26 from the Pennoni Honors College, started her time at Drexel University, she kept finding what she wanted to do. She'd walk into a product design class and think she'd found her major, only to take a business class and think that was it.

"That just kept happening. I would walk into my next class and just be inspired," Karmeli said. "Picking one and losing out on the others wasn't something I wanted to do."

Enter the Custom-Designed Major, a program from the Pennoni Honors College that allows students to plot out a course of study that combines elements from around Drexel to make something entirely new. Karmeli zeroed in on engineering technology, entrepreneurship and innovation, and design to make what she calls the "make stuff and help people" degree (officially, it's called "Entrepreneurial Engineering and Design).

For years, she's been making stuff and helping people, and it's led her to her senior design project: Steady Slice, an innovative cutting board created with upper limb impairments in mind. It's designed to help people who may not have use of both hands to make food prep and cooking easier. Right now, alternatives are inconvenient or expensive, such as unsafe tools or eating takeout or prepackaged meals.

She originally was interested in robotics and neuroscience and had wanted to create a robotic limb after seeing one of her teachers in high school struggle with a prosthetic leg after he lost his leg in the Army. She thought for years that technology could be put to better use for people who are missing limbs. She got the idea for Steady Slice after spending a day writing down everything she did and thinking about tasks she was able to do that she took for granted.

She also researched assistive tools and met Sri Balasubramanian, PhD, professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, who has been losing his eyesight and using a walking stick over the past few years. Through a senior design project, students designed a device that attaches to the stick that makes it easier to be hands-free - a small thing that made a big impact for Balasubramanian, she saw.

When she looked at the mobility cutting board market, options were slim and grim, Karmeli said. Some options had spikes that you could stab the food onto to hold it in place while cutting with one hand, but safety and sanitization proved to be risky. Karmeli wanted to improve the overall quality and keep the raised edge to make one-handed food transfer easy.

"In my research, I found plenty of adapted knives and cutting tools that already existed, so I decided to focus on stabilizing the food," Karmeli said.

One of the attachments of Karmeli's cutting board helps make slicing easier. Photo courtesy of Lelia Karmeli.

She decided on removable slides for different surfaces to address various diets and kinds of food; soon, she was looking at ways to stabilize the knife itself for different chopping, slicing and cutting needs, which required yet another pivot during her senior year. Karmeli interviewed occupational therapists and people with upper limb mobility impairments, and analyzed videos of people cutting using accessible boards to learn what angles were important and what angles needed more stability. She was inspired by the movement of scissors to allow for lever-like movement and an attachment that allows someone to use any knife with the board.

"I had my initial design that was different from everything else on the market, but I felt like it was still coming short of the people I was trying to serve and the actual goal that I was trying to achieve," Karmeli said. "Good design doesn't force people to adapt to the tool. It adapts the tool to the user. I was able to resolve this in the official first prototype after more interviews and tweaking the design."

Though she's done several design projects already, this was her first experience with accessibility design. The pivots and changes she had to make along the way taught her a lot, and Steady Slice feels like a good culmination of her major, Karmeli said. She wants to refine her prototype and begin user testing, and has talked to occupational therapists, people with limb mobility impairments and others who are also interested in seeing where it goes.

"I want to have ideas, be able to design them, create and manufacture them, and ultimately bring them out into the real world in a way that's sustainable for everyone involved," Karmeli said. "I feel like I have a lot of energy and love starting something new. It all seems so exciting."

She felt like her trio of focus in her major - engineering, product design and business - have prepared her to go down any number of avenues, which is exactly what she hoped for when she set out on the custom-designed path.

"It's brought not only the knowledge on how to do different things, but the connections to push those ideas forward as well," Karmeli said. "If you look at the world right now, you see things like AI reaching over so many disciplines and they're all extremely relevant. In custom design, you're still getting a part of each cake from each field. It's just a mix of them, and sometimes you end up with lemon cookie butter cake. It's everything together."

Drexel University published this content on June 24, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on June 24, 2026 at 18:46 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]