NRT-FW-HTF: NSF Traineeship in the Sustainable Development of Smart Medical Devices

Existing medical devices designed for widespread use in daily life introduce an associated challenge of environmental impact, particularly regarding material waste and carbon emissions from the production cycle. Recent advancements in electronic technologies expedite the production of a significantly higher volume of new medical devices. Addressing sustainability issues necessitates a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach and a concerted effort to train the next generation of designers and engineers to prioritize sustainability and innovation.

This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship award to the Georgia Institute of Technology will address this need by training master's and doctoral students in advanced sustainable medical devices that are both technologically sophisticated and environmentally responsible, offering traits like reusability and reliability, thus fulfilling a crucial national priority. The traineeship expects to provide a unique and comprehensive training opportunity for one hundred (100) students, including twenty-five (25) funded trainees, by combining multiple disciplines in medical devices, sustainable design, and manufacturing principles; collaborations with clinical partners and accelerators; hands-on experiences with health-related research; and a culture of innovative and translational research.

Trainees will learn about a broad spectrum of disciplines, including bioengineering, public policy, physiology, industrial design, interactive computing, and medicine. By bridging the gap that currently exists between sustainability, device technology, biodegradability, and medical science, the traineeship will address the lack of a framework to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, scientists, designers, policy-makers, and clinicians.

The traineeship’s major goal is to develop a multidisciplinary curriculum that combines methods from various domains to resolve ongoing challenges in developing reliable and personalized medical devices for healthcare. In partnership with clinical experts and medical product accelerators, the initiative will broaden students' perspectives beyond the current technology-first mindset and reflect the needs of patients and healthcare providers through sustainable technological solutions.

Another goal of the traineeship is to attract a more diverse group of students to the interdisciplinary field of healthcare technologies and contribute to promoting diversity in workforce development. The project will develop a new Ph.D. concentration area in smart medical devices within the bioengineering program and a new M.S. degree program in the sustainable development of medical devices embedded in the colleges of engineering, science, and design. Curriculum materials and best practices will be disseminated for other institutions to emulate.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.

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.