2019 AHMB MINDS Conference Grant

The 2019 MINDS (Mentoring for Innovative Design Solutions) Workshop organized by Alpha Eta Mu Beta, the National Biomedical Engineering Honors Society, will be held in parallel with the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting on October 17-20, 2019 in Philadelphia, PA. This award will support student travel to the MINDS Workshop and BMES Annual Meeting. The MINDS Scholar Program provides students with the opportunity to collaborate and network with peers and mentors from across the country for a 5-month period, while building necessary engineering design skills. The students would also learn about design considerations that are not usually stressed in coursework projects: (1) market considerations for commercialization, (2) regulatory strategy, and (3) evaluating prospects for intellectual property protection. Students will be selected through a competitive process, with junior undergraduates preferred. Students will then work with their teams and mentors to develop a design solution, and subject matter experts will provide support to the teams during this five-month design period. Teams will be encouraged to submit their designs to various design contests, investment opportunities, and grant programs. This program will develop a core group of engineers who will better understand the importance of considering human needs before attempting to design devices. Additionally, the collaborative and long-distance communication skills that students will develop in this project will better equip them to work in an environment that is increasingly dependent on communication between distant facilities and customers. 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.