Forming new connections
The Center for Medical and Engineering Innovation (CMEI) fosters interdisciplinary research through multiple initiatives that engage Ohio State faculty, staff, trainees, students and extramural entities whose focus is to expand innovation and impact at the intersection of medicine and engineering.
Research activities include:
- Organized lectures with tours of research facilities and equipment demonstrations to increase personnel familiarization with resources on campus.
- Workshops for attendees to gain additional laboratory equipment or software expertise.
- Collaborative interactions with existing Ohio State departments, centers, and institutes to expand utilization of resources in new and ongoing research endeavors.
CMEI recognizes that major advancements in medicine will involve a multitude of engineering-related disciplines such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Engineers working in concert with health professionals will alter the landscape for patient care. New developments are broadly expected in areas including advanced therapeutics (e.g. targeted drug delivery) and diagnostics (e.g. biosensors) as well as implantable and wearable devices. CMEI strives to facilitate innovative solutions and transformative applications such as these in medicine by promoting local collaborative efforts between physicians and engineers.
If you’re interested in collaborating with CMEI on a research project or educational activity, please submit this electronic form.
Launching innovative projects: CMEI Pilot Grants
CMEI is pleased to announce its 2024-2025 Pilot Grant Awards
The awardees and their OSU affiliations and projects are listed below.
The CMEI pilot grant program supports collaborations between Ohio State colleges that initiate promising ventures at the medicine-engineering interface. Proposed research involve at least one faculty member from the College of Engineering and one faculty member from one of the Health Sciences Colleges. These collaborations test innovative approaches (ideas, technologies, devices) directed at basic or clinically relevant biomedical research. In funding awards, special consideration has been given to applications addressing specific topics such as telemedicine, wearable devices, robotics, novel materials and artificial intelligence/machine learning. Other topic areas are expected to be emphasized in future funding opportunities. Our program funds $35,000 grants to assist faculty in obtaining preliminary data that will result in a collaborative grant application for the NIH, or another agency or foundation, or lead to an entrepreneurial endpoint such as a patent.
Additionally, in partnership with the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), pilot grant awardees are eligible to apply for a CTSI voucher for up to $5,000 funding support towards Ohio State University or Nationwide Children’s Hospital core service(s) that are part of the CTSI voucher program. These may include secure fee-based core services for services from CDME, DDDS or expert consultation services (such as biostatistics) with the ultimate goal of furthering clinical and translational research.
The next request for applications for CMEI pilot grant funding is likely to be announced in the late Spring of 2025. Please watch this space and various OSU news sources (e.g., onCampus, HealthBeat, etc.) for announcements.
The most recent round of proposals occurred in August, 2024. Awardees of CMEI Pilot Grants for the period 10/1/2024 – 9/30/2025 and their projects are:
- Megan Ballinger, PhD (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, Internal Medicine, COM) and Aleksander Skardal, PhD (Biomedical Engineering, COE)
Project: Validation of a Humanized Fibrotic Lung-on-a-Chip System - Michelle Nassal, MD, PhD (Emergency Medicine, COM) and Emre Ertin, PhD (Electrical and Computer Engineering, COE)
Project: Towards Personalized Intervention Protocols for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation: Digital Twin Modeling of the Cardio-Pulmonary System in Distress Using Reduced Order Models of Physiology and Generative AI Techniques - Juliet Varghese, PhD (Biomedical Engineering, COE) and Saurabh Rajpal, MD (Cardiovascular Medicine, Internal Medicine, COM)
Project: Developing a Single-Session Cardiopulmonary CPET-CMR Exam at Low-Field MRI
Previous awardees have included
9/15/2023 – 9/14/2024:
- Nathan Doble, PhD (Opthalmology & Visual Science, COO) and Stacey Choi, PhD (Opthalmology & Visual Science, COO), Srinivasan Parthasarathy, PhD (Computer Science and Engineering, COE), and Rajiv Ramnath, PhD (Computer Science and Engineering, COE)
Project: Generation of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) B-scan Images Directly from Spectrograph Data using AI - Megan Malara, PhD (CDME, COE) and Kyle VanKoevering, MD (Otolaryngology, COM)
Project: Development of a 3D Printing Platform Towards a Personalized, Tissue Engineered Vascularized Bone Scaffold - Nicholas Ferrell, PhD (Nephrology, Internal Medicine, COM) and Natalia Higuita-Castro, PhD (Biomedical Engineering, COE)
Project: Targeted Cellular Delivery of Nanoengineered Extracellular Vesicles for Acute Kidney Injury
9/15/2022 – 9/14/2023:
- Asimina Kiourty, PhD (Electrical and Computer Engineering, COE) and Toshimasa Okabe, MD (Cardiovascular Medicine, COM)
Project: Non-Invasive Determination of HV Interval Using a Wearable MagnetoCardioGraphy Sensor - Timothy F. Plageman Jr., PhD (COO) and Katelyn Swindle-Reilly, PhD (Biomedical Engineering, COE)
Project: Optimization of a Novel Technique to Bioengineer Lens Organoids - Emanuele Cocucci, MD, PhD (Division of Pharmaceutics and Pharmacology, COP), Derek Hansford, PhD (Biomedical Engineering, COE) and Francesca Cottini, MD (Hematology, COM)
Project: Development of a Localized, Time Controlled Perfusion System for Lattice Light Sheet Microscopy