NRT: Strengthening Healthcare Innovation through Nurse-Engineer Education

About This Grant

Healthcare is a universal concern, yet many challenges persist in hospitals and clinics, such as preventing medical errors, designing efficient patient care plans, and ensuring quality care. These issues have far-reaching effects influencing patient safety, healthcare costs, and the overall well-being of communities. The National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Massachusetts Amherst creates a new program that combines nursing’s hands-on patient care expertise with engineering’s technical problem-solving skills to tackle some of healthcare’s toughest challenges. The project anticipates training 28 PhD students, including 13 funded trainees, drawn from both fields. By working in hospital settings and partnering with industry, the trainees will learn to identify and understand healthcare problems at the point of patient care, create practical solutions that benefit patients and healthcare workers, and bring these innovations to the bedside as quickly and safely as possible. Through joint mentorship and immersive projects, the program will produce healthcare leaders who can work across different fields to transform healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes. The trainees will engage in convergence research that unites advanced engineering methods with clinical and contextual knowledge of nurses. By analyzing healthcare workflows, designing medical devices, and examining factors that affect patient outcomes, trainees will gain skills to develop and deploy effective interventions in real-world clinical environments. These efforts will be supported by an interdisciplinary curriculum and enriched by collaborations with healthcare providers and industry experts. Projects will aim to streamline healthcare delivery from hospital to home, leverage automation and robotics to ease clinician workload while enhancing safety, and make healthcare devices easier to use and connect to support caregivers and patients. By blending hands-on research experiences with leadership and communication training, this traineeship will cultivate professionals who champion nurse–engineer partnerships and drive innovations in healthcare. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. 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.