Training Program in Neuroengineering and Medicine

The aim of our training program, shared across Penn's Schools of Medicine and Engineering, is to train predoctoral PhD engineering students together with MD, and MD/PhD postdoctoral fellows in Neuroengineering and its clinical translation. Disorders of the nervous system, such as stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, depression, dementia, and head trauma, constitute 35% of all disease and disability, and the burden is rising. There is an explosion of promising therapies for these disorders in new technologies to image, analyze, and modulate neural circuits, but clinical translation is a challenge. It requires talented engineers educated in clinical science and technically proficient physicians who speak the same language. Our program focuses on Neuroengineering and Clinical Translation. We recruit from an excellent pool of ~60 MD fellows and ~ 100 PhD students each year, and demand is growing. MD and Engineering trainees together become fluent in cutting-edge technologies at the forefront of Neuroengineering, such as devices, neurostimulation, data science, algorithm development, cloud computing, nanotechnology and materials science. They innovate new therapies for human disease and gain a thorough understanding of the clinical, regulatory, and developmental environments necessary to safely bring new technologies to patients. The program's core is a group of collaboratives, multidisciplinary faculty mentors in engineering and the clinical neurosciences. In addition to dedicated Neuroengineering research, our training program includes: (1) a longitudinal mentored clinical experience for PhD candidates, (2) engineering lab immersion and tutorials for MD postdocs, (3) courses and seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience, Medicine, Scientific Communications, Regulatory Affairs, and Statistics, (4) training in the proper conduct of research, (5) workshops on professional and career development, scientific writing, oral presentation skills, and lab management, (6) our “statistician in residence,” leads didactic and interactive seminars on quantitative tools, experimental design, statistical methods, and (7) rigorous one-on-one mentoring and career counseling. Because our program is rooted in engineering, scientific rigor and quantitative literacy is embedded in all of our activities. This application for renewal describes improvements to our program: (1) a collaboration with Penn's Annenberg School of Communication– on presentation skills, (3) visiting “writers in residence,” and (3) career exploration with visiting “practitioners of excellence” from government, academia, industry, and other careers. We are pleased to increase our mentor diversity in this application for renewal, and to formalize novel undergraduate and resident recruiting to expand our strong pipeline of diverse trainees. Our program, leverages a superb training environment, including a compact campus where robust centers for Engineering, Medicine, Neuroscience, Statistics and Communication all reside within two blocks of each other, united through Penn's Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics.