Over the last several years, there has been a growing interest in strengthening existing productive collaborations between the neuroscience community at the University of Miami School of Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering to facilitate the development of new clinical technologies for the assessment of neurological function and the treatment of neurological diseases. For example, there is significant knowledge and on-going research that aims to promote functional recovery in patients with brain and spinal cord injury (SCI) and other neurosensory and neuromuscular disorders such as deafness and blindness. These activities have been facilitated through several joint faculty hires between the Department of Biomedical Engineering and clinical departments at the School of Medicine.
In the College of Arts and Sciences, the recent addition of a research-dedicated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) facility to the Psychology Department has led to the recruitment of several neuroscientists studying the neural basis and treatment of autism, depression, anxiety. Moreover, recent neuroscience hires across Biology and Physics Departments, leverage model organisms such as flies fish and worms to study the genetic and neural circuit bases of behavior. Importantly, many of these models are relevant to neurological diseases studied in Psychology and at the Miami Project. In addition, a recent hire in the Department of Computer Science provides new expertise in the area of Computational Neuroscience, and other faculty in Computer Science have recently developed collaborations with faculty at the School of Medicine in areas such as bioinformatics and systems biology with applications to neurodegenerative diseases. These new research programs represent a new opportunity to develop new collaborations in the field of neural engineering across schools, campuses and disciplines.
To capitalize on this collective talent, it is critical to have an institute that help to coordinate efforts across departments and schools. Each discipline has a range of externally and internally-funded neural science and engineering research projects, but these individual initiatives are fragmented. Creating an institute will promote synergistic programs and allow large program development and organized innovation. To energize fundamental aspects of neural science, engineering and reparative medicine and facilitate active collaborations across these various disciplines, there is an urgent need to establish an interdisciplinary institute that offers the necessary expertise, infrastructure and resources. The establishment of an interdisciplinary Institute for Neural Engineering at University of Miami (INEM) encourages multi-disciplinary and translational projects between diverse programs to promote engineering applications targeting neurological and psychiatric disorders by offering the expertise, infrastructure and resources necessary to bridge basic sciences with clinical applications and innovation at UM. We expect this institute will plant the seeds for new future fields and establish collaborative cognitive, learning and psychiatric neuroengineering projects for mental health and disorders.
