Innovation & Research

Establish an infrastructure that supports transformative research initiatives, leveraging engineering, sciences, humanities, and clinical expertise, which we can translate across the health care continuum, including needs of underserved populations and leveraging campus-wide humanities expertise.

Key objectives we will focus on over the next 5 years include

Act as a catalyst to facilitate basic, translational, and clinical research in collaboration with diverse disciplines and partner organizations. Close the gap between the basic and early translational research at UIUC and the clinical research at Carle including translating from pilot to practice.

Actions:

Grow support for students to participate in and lead healthcare related research.
Increase support for students to disseminate their research findings.
Expand support for campus faculty to conduct research with students.
Increase grant funding from the National Institute of Health(NIH) and the National Science Foundation(NSF).
Create and deploy a seed funding program.

Foster creativity, connect students, faculty, residents, and fellows, and facilitate the translation of innovations from research, the curriculum, and design projects to improve health care delivery, quality, and access, and to lower costs.

Actions:

Implement the Carle Illinois College of Medicine research mentors program connecting students with world class faculty to provide students with high touch/high impact training and mentorship opportunities.
Identify and connect students with clinical faculty to support student research.
Identify and connect students with campus faculty to support student research.

Optimize the monetization of innovations, through the development of intellectual property and start-ups, and other entrepreneurial activities in partnership with UIUC and Carle.

Actions:

Expand support for student-led efforts to develop new technologies and entrepreneurship.
Increase student awareness with Enterprise Works.
Develop multi-institutional innovation partnerships to grow our global impact and branding.

Facilitate and improve engagement with innovation opportunities for faculty, students, staff, other colleges, investors, companies, institutes, and community.

Actions:

Increase support for student to translate medical technologies through entrepreneurship.
Support community outreach programs to foster research and innovation more broadly.
Improve Health Innovation Professor(HIP) and other BMTS faculty-student interactions for research connections and participation.
Partner with technology providers to design and develop new tools or application in simulation training.
Develop innovative enabling technology to enhance medical training, clinical practice and community health education.
Create campus faculty mentor/advisor structure for students.