BIOE Department receives VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center Award and the opportunity to host Vietnamese scholars

Student exchange programs can be an incredible way to exchange ideas and learn more about other cultures. Thanks to a recent award, a team of bioengineering professors including Mark Anastasio, Marina Marjanovic, and project lead Stephen Boppart will have access to the benefits of student exchange through the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center.

The VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC) is a collaboration between VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam, and the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The center, established in 2021, was created to support high-impact research on biomedical sensing, informatics, and their applications, while promoting international cooperation and exchange.

“We want to open the door and disseminate our expertise and knowledge to anybody who would like to apply these methods,” said Professor Marjanovic. “This program is really opening the channels of collaboration.”

This upcoming collaboration between VinUni and UIUC is based on the proposal submitted by the team of BIOE researchers, titled “Evaluating the Effect of Antiviral Drugs using Polarized Light Imaging and Machine Learning Approaches: The Case of Human-induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-derived Cardiomyocytes.”

This research strives to develop a standard and robust procedure to evaluate the effectiveness of antiviral drugs using label-free, noninvasive light imaging and machine learning-based approaches. Identical disease treatments do not have the same effects on different people, and if this research is successful, it could make significant strides towards providing more accurate and personalized medicine.

UIUC and VinUni will work together on the project in the form of a student and researcher exchange. This award will span up to 10 years, with the capability to support up to five PhD students and one postdoctoral researcher. Both universities will send students and the post-doc to the other’s campus for a cultural and intellectual exchange.

The goal of the program, Marjanovic said, is to offer materials, research, and practical knowledge to students who participate in this program. Ultimately, Marjanovic hopes to see participating students have the opportunity to use novel label-free optical imaging technologies and machine learning approaches and translate them into clinical applications to address health problems in their home country.

In addition, Stephen Boppart and Mark Anastasio, together with Rohit Bhargava, are leaders of the newly launched NIH funded Center for Label-free Imaging and Multiscale Biophotonics (CLIMB), with Marjanovic serving as the Education and Outreach Coordinator for the center. Students from the collaboration with VinUni will benefit from the resources and expertise offered by this Center as well.

“We hope that through collaboration with VinUni, students can gain important knowledge and expertise for their future careers,” Marjanovic said. “This kind of research could have a huge impact at the societal level.”