Today, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, in collaboration with the Center for Global Surgery and the Center for Medical Innovation at the University of Utah, announce the launch of the Global Health Innovation and Technology (GHIT) emphasis for the Master of Science in Clinical Investigation (MSCI) degree program. Building on the established Master’s degree program led by CTSI and the Bench to Bedside Program run by CMI, the Global Health Innovation and Technology emphasis will help disrupt how we solve global health problems by working with local and global experts from clinical medicine, global health, business, engineering, and to address global health challenges.
“We are excited by the mentored training opportunities this new MSCI emphasis will provide for students to learn and practice solving global health problems through innovation,” says Julie Shakib, D.O., M.S., M.P.H., co-director of the MSCI degree program.
The goal of this flexible curriculum, which requires 12-24 months for completion, is to create future leaders in global health and resource-poor environments who overcome existing challenges through unconventional, innovative, and disruptive solutions.
Led by faculty members from the Departments of Surgery and Pediatrics with partners across centers, clinical and academic departments, and schools and colleges at the University of Utah, as well as global partners to teach this curriculum, the emphasis will recruit its first cohort of students to start in the Fall 2022 semester. It will combine in-person instruction at the University of Utah, as well as remote and asynchronous learning models.
This program offers students worldwide the opportunity to participate in a curriculum offering in-depth exposure to problem-solving in real-world settings.
“Solving global health problems requires new, equitable, and collaborative ways of bringing together clinical experts in global health with individuals who have expertise in entrepreneurship and commercialization,” says Sudha Jayaraman, M.D., F.A.C.S, M.Sc., co-leader of the MSCI emphasis. “This new emphasis gives us the opportunity use the lessons learned from the pandemic to change how we think about addressing persistent global health problems.”
The goal for each student is to build their own innovation project, including generating an innovation idea and hypothesis, then designing, implementing, and evaluating the project in one of the following fields: medical device innovation, health systems management and care delivery, digital health care, entrepreneurship and sustainability, education, or social entrepreneurship.
“Giving students the opportunity to take advantage of asynchronous instruction will let them become truly immersed in the local ecosystem,” says Bryan R. McRae, M.D., co-executive director of the Center for Medical Innovation and co-leader of the MSCI emphasis. “This is necessary for understanding how to develop an innovative, useful solution to problems facing that particular community’s health care system.”
For more information regarding the MSCI-GHIT program, please visit https://ctsi.utah.edu/education/msci.
***
About the Clinical and Translational Science Institute
The Utah Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) is the home for clinical and translational science across the state of Utah and within the Mountain West Region. It builds on a history of translational research at the University of Utah going back to Max Wintrobe—University of Utah’s first Chair of Internal Medicine and the recipient of the first extramural NIH grant. Our mission is to ensure the highest quality clinical and translational science and ultimately improve the health of our population. We develop and test methods to improve research design, conduct, evaluation, dissemination, and implementation and deploy these methods (and more traditional ones) to support researchers across the translational spectrum—providing community engagement, study design and analysis, informatics, and clinical research infrastructure to the institution.
About the MSCI Degree
The MS in Clinical Investigation (MSCI) degree program is administered by the Utah CTSI and provides classroom and mentored experience in clinical research and innovation, preparing its trainees for careers in academic medicine, the allied health sciences, and global health-related fields. The program prepares trainees to be competitive investigators and collaborators capable of gaining extramural funding for their projects. The curriculum of the MSCI focuses on the theories, models, competencies, methods, and tools used to conduct bench-to-bedside and bedside-to-community translational research. Candidates for the MSCI degree will elect one of three areas of emphasis or tracks: Track 1 emphasizes the inherited basis of human disease, mechanism-oriented clinical research, and bench-to-bedside translational research. Track 2 emphasizes epidemiology, health services research, and bedside-to-community translational research. Track 3 (Global Health Innovation and Technology) emphasizes human-centered design, principles of innovation, and global translational research. The MSCI program is also designed to support a mentored research or innovation capstone experience at the University of Utah Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine campus sites and its global collaborators.
About the Center for Global Surgery
The Center for Global Surgery at the University of Utah is the oldest such centers in the United States and a multi-disciplinary center across the Departments of Surgery and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Utah Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine. Focused on strengthening surgical capacity through innovation, research, and training, the center has partnerships with colleagues in multiple countries (Mongolia, Rwanda, Ghana, and Ethiopia), NGOs, and institutions. The center offers mentorship, didactic experiences, and project and career support to trainees of every level within the university and collaborators across settings. The center firmly believes that locally derived solutions by local experts are essential to addressing health care needs in every setting and is excited to collaborate on this educational initiative.
About the Center for Medical Innovation
The Center for Medical Innovation at the University of Utah provides an ecosystem for cultivating innovation in the life sciences by breaking down barriers between academic and industry application, fostering partnerships, and building a collaborative environment for the next generation of health care. By combining industry-leading experts from engineering, medicine, business, law, and commercialization, the Center for Medical Innovation provides formal education programs, resources for prototyping and business creation, and facilitation of real-world feedback for successful device development and commercialization. The Bench to Bedside Competition (B2B) is a multidisciplinary experiential educational program run by the center that introduces students to the world of medical technology innovation. Now entering its tenth year, the program has continued to grow in both scale and impact. More than 1,000 students have participated in 238 inter-disciplinary teams that have spawned innovative new health care technologies. More than 65 of these teams have moved forward to commercialize their creations. B2B companies from previous years are driving forward with their innovative new technologies. As a result, several have obtained regulatory clearance and have introduced their products to market.