The National Institutes of Health renewed the Department of Biomedical Engineering’s Comprehensive Training Program in Imaging Science and Informatics. The goals of this fellowship program are to train participants to become comprehensive imaging scientists and gain the necessary skills to identify clinically relevant problems. The $800,000 five-year grant provides support to four graduate student fellows each year.

imaging fellows

Fellows receive additional mentoring, professional development opportunities, and support through a summer externship, which gives students the freedom to work in a completely different environment from UT Austin, such as academic teaching hospitals, national laboratories, industry sites, or other universities.

Program highlights for fellows include a new clinical immersion course available through a partnership between the BME Department and Dell Medical School. The course will help trainees develop understanding of patients and health care professionals for whom they will be designing solutions. Each fellow is also required to take at least one course related to data mining and informatics, of which UT Austin provides more than 30 different course offerings in artificial intelligence and machine learning beneficial to health care.

For the 2020-2021 academic year the following students were accepted as fellows: Christian Jennings, a second-year graduate student working with Sapun Parekh; Christopher Smith, a second-year graduate student working in Andrew Dunn’s lab. Megan LaMonica and Noah Stern are two first-year graduate student recipients, currently rotating between research labs.

Imaging research in the BME department is a robust area. Faculty who teach in the Imaging Science Training Program bring in $19.4 million of research support. The fellowship has also helped the department innovate its imaging and informatics course offerings. The Functional Imaging Laboratory capstone course was originally developed during an earlier grant period specifically for this training program and is now offered to graduate students across the department. The clinical immersion course that faculty are developing with Dell Medical School during this grant period is also expected to increase opportunities for future students in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.