REU Site: Neurotechnologies to Help the Body Move, Heal, and Feel Again

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site award at the University of Houston (UH) will support the renewal of a REU Site focused on "Neurotechnologies to Help the Body Move, Heal, and Feel Again." This Site will inspire participants to pursue, with confidence, graduate education and future engineering careers with technical, ethical, and societal leadership. The REU site will pair 10 undergraduates per summer with faculty mentors from the Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (IUCRC BRAIN), for a 10-week research, educational, and outreach experience in the field of neural, cognitive and rehabilitation engineering.

The REU Site addresses society's current critical needs for the aging and disabled populations, leverages current research strengths in the IUCRC BRAIN, and is expected to resonate with undergraduate students and the general public, who have a rising awareness of healthcare and innovative health management devices and are interested in addressing the growing national need for effective management of chronic diseases in the aging population. Thus, this site will give students an opportunity to contribute to the development of safe, effective and affordable personalized neurotechnologies for diagnostics, restoration, enhancement, and rehabilitation of sensory, motor, affective, and cognitive functions.

This goal will be pursued by supporting innovative interdisciplinary research across the multiple dimensions of brain function and behavior with the ultimate goal of improving the national health in an inclusive environment that promotes the active participation of underrepresented groups.

The REU Site is led by an outstanding group of nationally recognized faculty mentors and innovators from the University of Houston's IUCRC BRAIN faculty to guide undergraduates in addressing grand challenges in neural, cognitive, and rehabilitation engineering. The goal of the REU is to excite, inspire, train, and nurture future undergraduates and to provide research experiences in projects with clear societal impact to students who might not otherwise have opportunities for research experiences at their own institutions.

The site will actively recruit students underrepresented in STEM fields and from non-research institutions. At the end of their REU experience, students will understand the societal impact of neurotechnologies, develop research laboratory skills and good engineering practices, obtain hands-on training in research tools, cultivate soft skills, learn about innovation and entrepreneurship in engineering, understand the ethical aspects of neurotechnology, appreciate and promote the value of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in research, develop early mentoring skills, and participate in social activities that promote a collegial and collaborative atmosphere among student participants, while learning about the community.

Research areas will include, but are not limited to, device development, neural activity measurement, neuromodulation, neurorehabilitation and assistive devices, and artificial intelligence applications in rehabilitation, and brain research. The ultimate goal of this REU site is to advance the national health.

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.