By Wende Whitman and Christine Kueter
Home sensors to monitor cancer patients’ pain. A smartphone app to manage breast cancer patients’ anxiety and depression. And $12 million in new grant funding to pay for even more health care advances, earned from just a $2 million initial investment.
These are just a few of the remarkable, positive results of the University of Virginia’s CENTER OF ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE, which launched in 2017 and has developed A ROBUST PROCESS to help its affiliated researchers win funding from institutions like the National Institutes for Health.
The center identifies promising research at the boundaries of engineering and medicine and provides seed grants allowing researchers to get started on their ideas and eventually earn external grant funding. The center also supports LAB EMBEDDING; offers acculturation workshops to help engineers and medical practitioners speak each other’s languages; and partners with research teams to provide grant proposal development resources like NIH PROPOSAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOPS – from the formation of an idea to submitting and revising a grant proposal.
The latest center researchers receiving multimillion-dollar NIH awards are VIRGINIA LEBARON, a nurse scientist and assistant professor at the UVA School of Nursing, who is focused on TREATING CANCER PAIN AND DEPRESSION WITH MOBILE TECHNOLOGY and whose team has won a $3.4 million grant to develop a smart health sensing system to help patients and family caregivers manage cancer pain; and PHILIP CHOW, an assistant professor at the Center for Behavioral Health & Technology at the UVA School of Medicine, whose team has won a $2.1 million grant to use phone apps to manage anxiety and depression in breast cancer patients. Chow was also selected for an additional and rare opportunity to extend his grant through the NIH merit award extension option. Read more…