Workshop on Engineering Innovation for Health; Houston, Texas; 2024

This grant will support early-career investigator participation at a workshop on Engineering Innovation for Health in Houston, Texas, in 2024. With recent development of new technologies including molecular imaging, genome editing and artificial intelligence, the field of medicine is on the verge of a paradigm shift to have unprecedented engineering-driven precision in disease diagnosis treatment. To further develop engineering innovation for health, and better train the next-generation of leaders in this field, this workshop will bring together national and international academic experts, industry practitioners, and clinicians to discuss the cutting-edge research in developing biotechnologies and the unprecedented opportunities to revolutionize medicine and healthcare, elucidate major issues and challenges in this interdisciplinary field, and identify future research directions that will significantly benefit our society. It is expected that this workshop will help develop novel ideas and transformative research projects that integrate engineering and life sciences, address fundamental biological issues, and solve biomedical problems that significantly improve human health. The specific objective of this grant is to support the travel of 20 junior investigators, especially females and underrepresented minorities, to attend the Engineering Innovation for Health Workshop, to be held in 2024 in Houston, Texas. This 2-day workshop will cover a broad range of topics, with a strong focus on revolutionary technologies for better disease diagnosis and therapies. The presentations and discussions at this Workshop will advance our understanding of the underlying scientific and technological issues and challenges in further developing innovative technologies for health, and facilitating interdisciplinary studies that may lead to a broader range of applications of engineering innovation to medicine, from revolutionary technologies for disease therapies, to advanced molecular imaging methods, to new computational and AI based approaches, to new devices for biosensing and disease diagnostics, to new methods using synthetic biology and mechanobiology. The results of the workshop will be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding and impact. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.