21st Century Opportunities in Biomedical Engineering; Impacting Healthcare from the Clinic to Industry

This award supports the 45th Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC) which will be hosted by the Rutgers University Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Rutgers University Livingston Campus Student Center, 84 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, on March 27 - 29, 2019. The funds requested will primarily be used to subsidize undergraduate and graduate student registration fees and cover website and publication costs associated with the conference venue. INTELLECTUAL MERIT: The intellectual merit of the 45th NEBEC is to showcase biomedical engineering research and education programs while stimulating inter-university collaborations within the Northeast U.S. Because of the large number of Biomedical Engineering programs within the Northeast United States and their proximity to a high concentration of leading medical centers as well as pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical device industries the NEBEC offers numerous opportunities for student, faculty, clinical, and industrial interactions in order to strengthen research, educational, clinical, and industrial impacts of biomedical engineering. We wish to present the conference through a lens focused on specific initiatives and centers at Rutgers University as well as offering industrial opportunities due to Rutgers? unique location at the center of the NJ "cure corridor" being within 50 miles of numerous fortune 500 health care companies. BROADER IMPACTS: The broader impacts of this support are to promote student participation in the NEBEC to allow interaction opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students enrolled in bioengineering/biomedical engineering programs in the Northeastern U.S. We hope to promote opportunities for undergraduates to present their research to a diverse audience. In particular, efforts will be made to recruit early career investigators, female investigators, and investigators from underrepresented groups to participate in the conference. We will ensure that woman and minorities have opportunities to present and attend the meeting. By subsidizing registration costs, we hope to reduce registration fees for all participants compared to the fees charged from other NEBEC venues in recent years. This will help us recruit young investigators and students from underrepresented groups to broaden the participation of a diverse group of investigators who may otherwise not be able to attending the workshop. This conference will provide a venue for biomedical engineering programs located in the Northeast U.S. to present research, while promoting the exchange of ideas and technologies in order to expand research and educational collaborations as well as providing interaction with representatives from the pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical device industries. 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.