Advancement of Diagnostics by Joining User-centered and Scalable Technologies - Training Program (ADJUST TP)

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. This T32 proposal is for the support of an interdisciplinary, pre-doctoral training program that is an integral part of the Center for Advancement of Diagnostics by Joining User-centered and Scalable Technologies (ADJUST Center) at Emory University, Georgia Tech, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The goal of this innovative graduate program is to create the next generation of inventors of point-of-care/home diagnostic technologies. Moreover, our unique training program will not only teach PhD students about diagnostic technology development but also validation, translation, and commercialization thereof, and importantly, enable our trainees to ensure that the technologies they develop serve those who need them the most. Our trainees will be recruited from an applicant pool of >80 eligible PhD students from the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory, the interdisciplinary Bioengineering (BioE) Graduate Program at Georgia Tech, and the Department of Chemistry at Emory. BioE graduate students come from various Departments, including Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Our unique program will train our students on all aspects of development, assessment, and manufacturing of diagnostics, ranging from mid/high complexity clinical laboratory, point-of-care, and home-based/OTC tests and will incorporate the regulatory, verification and validation, user-centered design/human factors, and commercialization aspects thereof, but just as importantly, we will teach our trainees how to apply those technical principles under the auspices of achieving improved access to diagnostics. To that end, trainees will: 1) take foundational courses in biosensors, microfluidics/microfabrication, wearables design, AI/ML data science, medical device development, innovation/commercialization at Georgia Tech, 2) take healthcare-related courses at Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center, 3) complete “internal internships” within our diagnostics centers’ infrastructures including but not limited to, the clinical laboratories of Emory Healthcare and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and our center’s rapid microdevice prototyping facility, 4) complete official internships with our Centers’ medical device industry partners, 5) conduct clinical needs assessments in various communities in metropolitan Atlanta and rural Georgia, and 6) engage in unique programs integral to our diagnostics centers including “technology clinics” that assess/validate/implement new diagnostics and our “Diagnostic and Disease Discovery” clinic, a state-of-the-art, specialty referral clinic dedicated to evaluating patients with longstanding undiagnosed symptoms who might benefit from new diagnostic or biomarker technologies.