SIF121 Engineering in Medicine EIM

Project Manager: Mark Sochor

The purpose of this project is to facilitate collaboration between engineering and medicine disciplines to attract talent, increase volume and impact of research, and improve innovation and patient care.

BoV Approved: June 2017

Project Dates: 8/30/2017 – 8/29/2023

Total Funding: $5,000,000

Executive Summary

Many of the most innovative, high-impact approaches to complex medical problems facing our society are now emerging at the interface between Engineering and Medicine. UVA has critical strategic advantages in this area, including the physical proximity of the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, and Nursing and our endowed Coulter Translational Partners Program. This EIM effort will have widespread impact not just in SEAS and SOM, but across the entire University. This project proposes to vault UVA to national and international leadership in this emerging area by creating the nation’s best ecosystem for generating, developing, and translating innovative ideas at the engineering-medicine interface to improve prevention, diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of disease. Successful execution of the proposed plan will have dramatic, sustained benefits for the university, including: drawing top students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty to UVA to work at the Engineering-Medicine interface; increasing the volume and real-world impact of externally funded research; enhancing healthcare-related innovation and technology transfer; and improving patient care.

Current Status: Active

Progress

The mission of the University of Virginia Center for Engineering in Medicine is to create the nation’s best ecosystem for generating, developing, and translating innovative ideas at the engineering-medicine interface to improve prevention, diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of disease. That mission is pursued through three primary activities:

• Building partnerships between engineers and clinicians;
• Providing seed grants to help teams launch high-impact, high-quality projects that can attract external funding; and
• Training and embedding engineering, medical, and nursing students and fellows into each other’s environments to help them collaborate more effectively.

In the four years since receiving the Engineering in Medicine Strategic Investment Fund award, the EIM project team has built a comprehensive Center for Engineering in Medicine that has garnered national attention, created more than 150 new faculty partnerships, funded 61 seed grants involving 142 faculty from 41 Departments and Divisions across SEAS, SOM, SON, and CLAS, produced over $120M in new research proposals submitted and $18.1M in new external research funding awarded, and pioneered new models for training students and connecting faculty. The project team has exceeded all of the original Y4 metrics and some of the original Y5 metrics.