IGERT: Interdisciplinary Research Training in Rehabilitation Engineering

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports training in engineering and rehabilitation sciences to prepare future scientists who have a deep understanding of human function and needs, and can design innovative rehabilitation devices, systems, and techniques to help people with disabilities more fully participate in society.Intellectual Merit: This program focuses on technology innovations related to mobility, manipulation, and cognitive/behavioral limitations. A key feature of this IGERT award is in-depth technical and clinical training with each trainee being advised by a mentor team with expertise in engineering and a clinical discipline. This program is distinguished by its ability to attract high proportions of students with disabilities and veterans. The relevance of rehabilitation engineering to real life serves as an attractor for these students, allowing them the opportunity to improve their own lives and the lives of other people. Additionally, trainees will be introduced to entrepreneurship and commercialization through coursework, invited speakers, and multidisciplinary team competitions.Broader Impacts: This program is intended to make a contribution to a generation of a technically savvy, clinically astute, and innovation-minded workforce in the field of rehabilitation science and engineering. It will contribute to the basic understanding of how to create deeper collaborations between the clinical science and engineering communities to create enabling solutions for people with disabilities, how to structure graduate programs so that they are more effective in attracting and retaining a diverse set of graduate students, and how to take better advantage of the multinational character of the rehabilitation communities to improve the quality of graduate education.IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit.