Seminars

Over the past 4+ decades, the advances of biomedical science have amplified our understanding of disease at an astounding pace.  Pivotal discoveries and significant strides toward in vivo understanding and delivery have also been forthcoming.  Clearly, these broad impacts in biomedical science would not have been possible without dramatic advances in methodologies and technologies for realization.  However, at the turn of the millennium, the realization that clinical translation of these discoveries was a major bottleneck to the preceding three decades of discovery and inspired a call-to-action for the scientific community which continues today.  More specifically, in the last 15 years, summits, roundtable discussions, and healthcare impact studies have pointed at the inability to translate discoveries, inadequate clinical research infrastructure, a mismatch between workforce compatibility and need, and, most concerning, a public questioning of the value proposition associated with research.  Has the ‘social contract’ between science and society been taken for granted?  At the Vanderbilt Institute in Surgery and Engineering (VISE), we have been developing translational frameworks to resolve these impediments by training engineers to be intimately familiar with human disease & treatment as well as in the inception of novel technology-based platforms.  We hypothesize that continued scientific discoveries, novel developments in treatments and delivery, and the improvement of patient care are highly dependent on these types of research and training environments.  In this talk, we will identify important needs within translational research, demonstrate the important role of engineering within translational research using examples of computation-enhanced surgery and intervention, and discuss novel training frameworks that codify these efforts.