REU Site: Imaging in Medicine and Biology for Underrepresented Minorities

Diverse teams are needed to solve complex engineering problems. However, the lack of research opportunities in engineering and other STEM-related fields prevents undergraduates from underrepresented groups from considering STEM as a viable and rewarding career path. To improve this situation, this Imaging in Medicine and Biology for Underrepresented Minorities REU site will provide an environment for underrepresented minorities (URM) undergraduates to complete individual research projects under the mentorship of leaders in their respective fields, in a world-class interdisciplinary research environment.

The Imaging in Medicine and Biology for Underrepresented Minorities REU site will also provide structured enrichment programs to participants that will allow students to develop critical skills needed to be successful in STEM graduate education (GRE preparation, time management, oral/written presentation). The University of Rochester (UR) is an ideal setting for this REU site; it is the home of the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound (RCBU), the Institute of Optics, the Goergen Institute for Data Science (GIDS), and the Del Monte Institute of Neuroscience—members of which will serve as mentors in this REU site.

Imaging is crucial to medicine (disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring), but it is also the driving force behind many transformative technologies, including robotics, self-driving cars, and facial recognition. At its foundation, imaging is a highly multidisciplinary field that combines various engineering disciplines (e.g., electrical engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, materials science, and medicine) to create a cohesive whole.

Like other disciplines, artificial intelligence is changing imaging. It requires diverse teams to solve new challenges, which requires us to train and expand the diversity of researchers capable of making meaningful contributions to imaging science and engineering.

This REU program will provide ten students annually with exciting interdisciplinary research opportunities in computational imaging, optical imaging, and ultrasonic imaging science with mentors in disciplines ranging from engineering to computer science to neuroscience to microbiology. The REU site program will organize workshops on career development, community colloquiums, scientific research in chosen laboratories, and a bootcamp on scientific programming focusing on fundamental medical imaging techniques.

Students will regularly meet with professional and research mentors to formulate the next steps regarding appropriate graduate programs that align with research interests discovered during the REU experience. Participants in the REU site will complete individual projects under the mentorship of leaders in their respective fields. In these projects, participants will use computational, optical, or ultrasound imaging techniques to solve significant medicine and biology problems.

Participants will interact with their professional advisors to demystify the graduate school program and improve their professional skills. Other planned activities will include community colloquiums, a MATLAB programming bootcamp that teaches students image processing techniques such as image segmentation, principal component analysis, and multidimensional filter design, which are fundamental to medical imaging.

Students will work with their professional and research mentors to formulate the next steps to pursue their research interests. Research mentors in the proposed REU will teach participants how to develop their research project; collect data from several imaging modalities (functional ultrasound, shear wave elastography, bioluminescence, micro-CT, magnetic resonance imaging); design algorithms for image analysis, 2D and 3D image reconstructions, computer vision; perform experiments on rodents, cell culture, and phantoms; and iteratively refine the solutions.

Students will present their research findings to other students, mentors, and the research community at UR at a research symposium at the end of the 10-week research experience. Students will also be encouraged to submit their research findings to national conferences or co-author peer-reviewed publications. Three thematic research areas will serve as the foundation for this REU site: 1) ultrasonic Imaging, 2) computational Imaging, and 3) optical Imaging.

This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.

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.