UConn's Nursing and Engineering Innovation Center Unique Nationwide

STORRS, CT — The University of Connecticut has established a new Nursing and Engineering Innovation Center. It is one of the first of its kind in the nation and it aims "to advance health care, workforce, and economic development through interdisciplinary collaborations."

The center, announced Thursday, is a partnership between the UConn schools of Engineering and Nursing and will focus on research, education, community engagement, and technology transfer, officials said.

It will join the expertise of nursing professionals "who interact daily with patients and are taught to adapt and solve problems as necessary to fix unique health issues" with the engineering experts "to thrive in creating new devices to improve quality of life."

More information is available on UConn Today.

The Center is under the co-direction of Tiffany Kelley, a visiting professor and director of the School of Nursing’s Healthcare Innovation Online Graduate Certificate Program and Leila Daneshmandi, Ph.D., an assistant professor in residence in innovation and entrepreneurship and Director of the entrepreneurship hub in the School of Engineering.

"Engineers are trained to solve problems and create solutions. They have the technical knowledge, skills, and abilities to actualize new technologies," Daneshmandi said. "By partnering with nurses and health care professionals, who have deep contextual knowledge of on-site problems and needs, we can ensure that our innovations are user-centric and designed for unmet health care needs."