For what he lacks in limb and brain, “Pillbert,� the automatic vial-dispensing robot, makes up for in efficiency and intelligence. In about 30 seconds, he can count and label a student’s prescription with precision, choosing from 108 different medications stored within his sturdy frame and dispensing through nine windows.

Pillbert frees pharmacists to spend more time with patients, educating them on how to take their medications properly, outlining special directions and precautions, and explaining how the medications can improve their health.

Located on the first floor of the Student Health Services building on Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s main campus, the pharmacy allows  students to conveniently obtain prescribed medications during the same visit with their doctor. Last year, pharmacists filled almost 40,000 student prescriptions.

For his efforts, Pillbert earned an “outstanding� performance review in his first year, says Hetal Patel, pharmacy manager at Student Health Services.

“It is accurate, and it streamlines the workflow for us,� he says. “It has not failed or been inaccurate at all in a year and a half. Pillbert contributes to our efficiency and enhances the quality of care we provide — all with zero undercounts, overcounts or instances of mislabeling. Ultimately, that makes us more available to the students, and we can engage in more meaningful interactions with them.�

The six-foot-tall robot has 54 compartments on each side stocked with the pharmacy’s most prescribed drugs, including antibiotics.  To help pharmacists, Pillbert first creates a label, then uses a camera to identify each medication and an internal mechanical arm to count and dispense the correct number of pills into a bottle.

On average, it takes about three minutes to count, label and verify each medication. Pillbert saves pharmacists nearly 40 hours of labor a week, according to a Student Health Services analysis, and assists with 80-100 prescriptions a day.

“It used to be a bottleneck if someone had five prescriptions,� Patel says. “Before Pillbert, dispensing multiple prescriptions may have slowed services for others who were waiting to receive a smaller order, such as simple antibiotic prescriptions. Now it can be processed promptly as Pillbert can process multiple prescriptions simultaneously and deliver through one of the nine windows.�

While Pillbert handles the mechanics of counting and labelling prescriptions, Patel says that he and his colleagues remain responsible for checking for patient allergies, interactions between drugs and other contraindications and precautions for overall patient safety.

“For routine medication refills, he takes away inefficiencies, time-consuming tasks and human error,� he says. “We get more time to check refill histories and ask patients questions like, ‘How is the medication working for you? Do you have any questions or concerns about the medications?’ Those details make a big difference.�

As Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ grew and Student Health’s patient load increased, Patel saw the need to make the pharmacy more efficient. However, the technology, cost and capabilities for robotic systems weren’t aligned with the pharmacy’s needs until 2023. That’s when Patel and his colleagues were inspired to purchase the Kirby-Lester KL-108 automatic vial dispensing robot the following year.

To celebrate the new technology, Student Health Services held a naming contest for the robot and even made him his own Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ ID card and cartoon photo.

Pharmacists perform routine maintenance on the robot when the pharmacy is closed.

“Taking care of him is pretty easy,� says Binita Patel, a Student Health Services pharmacist. “It takes seconds to refill and replace the cassettes.�

Patel says that although Pillbert is a machine, he has integrated smoothly into the team and is an essential part of the pharmacy.

“He’s a great addition to our team,� she says. “He never complains, and he always shows up.�

APIC is the leading professional association for infection preventionists, with more than 15,000 members. Prins is one of just 39 fellows selected worldwide this year.

“Fellow is a signifier of your commitment, not just to APIC, but to infection prevention as a profession,� says Marie Wilson, a fellow of APIC and infection preventionist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who served on the APIC Communications Committee with Prins. “Infection prevention is a young profession and every fellow that carries that distinction is a part of getting us to where we are today.�

Prins began her career as a virologist, before a passion for public health inspired her to transition to epidemiology, studying healthcare-associated infections and how to prevent them from spreading.

“I was really interested in the transmission and spread of these tiny microbes that can wreak so much havoc on a person and how we can prevent that,� Prins says.

Her first role was in hospital infection control at University of Florida Shands Hospital in 2006 before shifting toward education and research as a UF Department of Epidemiology faculty member in 2010. But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, she was found herself practicing infection prevention again.

“During the pandemic, I was the infection preventionist for the whole campus, which brought me back into that applied infection prevention role that I was doing before, but in a very different setting,� Prins says. “I think that sparked my interest again in being able to work with people to communicate how to prevent these infections.�

As the pandemic began to subside, Prins began exploring ways to continue to support infection prevention beyond her local community. She joined the APIC Communications Committee, which provides infection prevention information and materials to medical professionals, hospitals and the public.

“Dr. Prins has a depth of knowledge and expertise that I truly valued working with her on the Communications Committee,� Wilson says. “She was very calm, reliable and kind in a way that I really appreciated as a colleague.�

Prins joined the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine’s population health sciences department as an associate professor of medicine in 2023, where she is working to improve infection prevention in nursing homes, both through her own research and mentoring Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ medical students researching infection prevention.

“In nursing homes, you have people who have frequent encounters with hospitals and are very ill and also may have medical devices or non-healing wounds that make them sicker and really susceptible to infection,� she says.

To fight this, Prins is working with a company to test a shoe insert to provide contact tracing in nursing homes. If an infectious disease outbreak begins, nursing home staff attempt to track who has had contact with other people to find who may be infected. But patients with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia may not be able to recall who they have been in contact with or where they have been. This new technology hopes to tackle that.

Prins also serves as a mentor for the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine’s Focused Inquiry and Research Experience module, which requires medical students to complete a research project during their first two years of medical school.

This year, Prins is working with a student who is analyzing the effectiveness of new Centers for Disease Control and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services protocols designed to reduce the spread of infectious diseases. These precautions, implemented last year, require nursing home personnel to wear gowns or gloves for high-contact care with patients at a high risk for multidrug-resistant organisms. Together, the student and faculty mentor hope to understand how the protocols are being implemented and if they are improving patient safety.

“When infection prevention is being done well, you don’t see it at all,� Prins says. “It’s about preventing harm and keeping people safe.�

This includes using AI to assist in collecting and deciphering diagnostic data among medical professionals.

One such model, “BioMedGPT,� has shown great potential to expand patient access to healthcare. The new model has been detailed in a study in Nature Medicine.

The AI tool was developed by a collaborative team of researchers that was led by Lehigh University and included Chen Chen, an associate professor at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s (CRCV).

Chen says there are many existing examples of AI used for healthcare, but many are highly specialized and may only perform limited tasks.

However, BiomedGPT can perform multiple tasks, including image classification, report generation and visual question answering, and is designed to be computationally efficient and open-sourced to foster collaboration, according to the study.

BiomedGPT could find a niche in providing easily accessible data to bolster hospitals that may not have a robust number of personnel, so relying on shared knowledge from medical networks via BiomedGPT could be of great help, he says.

“In these hospitals, they may not a lot of physicians or clinicians that can address a case immediately or they don’t have enough resources to diagnosis,â€� Chen says. “This powerful AI tool is able to provide that knowledge to help to reduce [challenges] in healthcare.â€�

The model is open source, which means practitioners can use the framework and plug in their own data to collaborate and review amongst themselves in a community network.

BiomedGPT also aims to be generalist, meaning it can be more comprehensive and thorough so that it may be applied to a wider breadth of medical data and analysis, Chen says.

“BiomedGPT is a unified AI model that is able to process a variety of data and perform multiple tasks,â€� he says. “So, this is useful, because it can be potentially can streamline the healthcare workflow, improve the diagnosis accuracy and reduce the need of multiple specialized systems. This model can even generate reasonable results on tasks or data that hadn’t been trained on before.â€�

Leveraging Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s Expertise in Computer Vision

Chen used his computer vision and machine learning expertise to develop the AI model to understand medical images.

“My role was to figure out how we can extract useful information from visual data, especially for medical imaging and how can we integrate this information with other types of data modalities like text,� Chen says. “Imaging modalities are a big part of this because in healthcare, we have a lot of imaging data such as X-rays, CT scans and MRI.�

BiomedGPT can perform multiple tasks, including image classification, report generation and visual question answering, and is designed to be computationally efficient and open-sourced to foster collaboration, the researchers state in their study. A clinician can upload an image and enter queries into BiomedGPT such as “What disease does this image depict?� or “Please determine the patient’s eligibility by comparing the given patient note and clinical trial details� and receive feedback based on an existing set of provided data integrated into the AI model’s framework.

According to the study, BiomedGPT exhibits robust prediction ability with a low error rate of 3.8% in question answering and a satisfactory performance with an error rate of 8.3% in writing complex radiology reports, and competitive summarization ability with a nearly equivalent preference score to human experts.

Chen emphasizes though that clinicians and experts ultimately are responsible for reviewing the accuracy AI predications and supplementing the data.

“We are not trying to replace the clinician, but rather to enhance or make their workflow more efficient,� Chen says. “A physician can look at an AI report and perhaps for some of the less complex cases they can quickly check to see if it is correct. The human will still be involved and with their expertise, they can make the correct prediction or the diagnosis.�

He says the model is designed to be computation friendly and also fully open sourced.

“This is trying to foster the collaborations with research institute hospitals to use this and also improve the model over the time,� he says.

Next Steps

The study and analysis of BiomedGPT are promising, but there is still much to refine, Chen says.

New datasets and imaging could be integrated while there also remains more evaluations for the platform’s consideration of safety, equity and bias.

“One thing is that we are looking to incorporate is more or [varied] data and modalities,â€� he says. “For example, we can include more video data and physiological signals like EKGs and heart rate monitoring. Another direction is we want to address are some of the most important issues in healthcare AI in general, like the privacy.”

The University of Georgia, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of California, Santa Cruz, The Mayo Clinic, Samsung Research America, Stanford University and UTHealth (University of Texas) also contributed to this research.

The BiomedGPT open source model is available .

Researcher’s Credentials:

Chen is an associate professor at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s CRCV and previously served as a postdoctoral scholar for the center from 2016 to 2018. His main research interests are computer vision, image and video processing, and machine learning. In 2016 Chen earned his doctoral degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.

As the leader of a national research team focused on developing technologies for biomedical imaging and therapy to improve health, Tromberg spoke Nov. 1 at the College of Medicine’s fourth annual John C. and Martha Hitt Grand Rounds.

“Grand Rounds are a tradition in medical schools, a time when we come together, to teach and to learn from one another, with the goal of increasing excellence in patient care,� says Deborah German, vice president for health affairs and medical school dean. “Dr. Tromberg’s message is that we can do far more together than we can ever do separately.�

The NIH includes 27 institutes and centers focused on specific health conditions. And the NIBIB works with each institute to create new technologies to better treat and diagnose those diseases, Tromberg says.

He cited the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. As the U.S. and world struggled with a new, deadly virus with no vaccine yet, healthcare leaders knew they needed a large-scale testing mechanism. But would patients accept in-home testing? Would they be able to accurately conduct such a test? Timing was critical, so the agency held a national “Shark Tank� for at-home testing proposals. They received about 1,000 concepts, then worked with scientists, healthcare providers, vendors and government regulators to bring the test kits to market. That medicine-engineering partnership led to the manufacture of 7.8 billion at-home kits that allow patients and their families to know within minutes if they have COVID-19.

“The pandemic brought a new wave of engineering and medical partnerships,� he says, adding, “This was a paradigm shift. People now expect to be able to do testing at home.�

He highlighted new research into at-home devices that could improve health, including:

• Voice analysis that could diagnose a variety of conditions, including neurological disease, pediatric speech disorders, respiratory conditions and even mood disorders.
• Hepatitis C tests, which could allow patients to test and begin treatment in an hour. He says such tests are needed because about 4 million people carry the virus but don’t know they have it.
• Viral load studies for patients with HIV and AIDS to see how their treatments are working.
• At-home fetal and healthy mother monitoring.

The biggest challenge in such partnerships, he says, is that physicians and engineers speak different languages. Working in teams allows both sides to learn from each other and encourages innovation.

Tromberg gave his presentation moments after attending an announcement by the College of Medicine and CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, of a new lab in Lake Nona that will bring together physicians, biomedical and physical scientists to create light-based therapies that improve health. The lab will be located in the Burnett Biomedical Sciences Building and its Medical City location will allow interdisciplinary research opportunities for medical students, residents and fellows, and clinicians from Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ Lake Nona Hospital, the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ Lake Nona Cancer Center, Orlando VA Medical Center and Nemours Children’s Health.

“Human health is now a top priority of engineering programs,� he says. “We are all recognizing the power of new technology. The time has never been better for these partnerships.�

Tromberg has co-authored more than 450 publications and holds 25 patents in new technology development as well as bench-to-bedside clinical translation, validation and commercialization of devices. Before joining the NIH in 2019, Tromberg was professor of biomedical engineering and surgery at the University of California, Irvine. There, he served as director of the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic and the Laser Microbeam and Medical Program, an NIH National Biomedical Technology Center. He is a fellow of the International Society of Optical Engineering, Optica, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine.

The John C. and Martha Hitt Grand Rounds event is made possible by the generosity of the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation, which supports the event to honor Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s former president and first lady. President Hitt was a driving force behind the creation of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s medical school in 2006.

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ researchers, led by Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½Â Â Professor Debashis Chanda, developed a “barcodingâ€� technique to quickly identify chiral molecules based on their unique infrared fingerprints, potentially speeding up pharmaceutical and medical advancements.

The molecules can be identified using a special pixelated 2D sensor array that interacts with precise light with the specific properties of the molecules to capture their unique vibrational absorptions, which are then mapped as a barcode.

The study was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and was recently published in Advanced Materials.

Chiral molecules are pairs that are similar in structure but are twisted differently (left or right), like how a person’s left and right hands are mirror images of each other. Understanding the nature of chiral molecules is crucial to biological and pharmaceutical research because the mirror image pairs — known as enantiomers — can each have different effects in the body or in chemical reactions.

Nearly 56% of all modern drugs and medicine are chiral in nature, and about 90% of those are a mixture containing equal amounts of two enantiomers of a chiral compound. Researchers often face the challenge of separating enantiomers or synthesizing only the desired enantiomer to ensure optimal therapeutic outcomes and minimize adverse effects.

Most modern medicines and drugs are chiral and are marketed as racemates (equal mixtures of enantiomers), which in some cases can have unwanted consequences, Chanda says. This highlights the need for techniques that can identify such molecules reliably and accurately.

“On molecular adsorption, the combined system’s response depends on the degree and positional overlap of the molecule’s absorbance and sensor resonance,� Chanda says. “The measured signal is analyzed and encoded to generate a ‘chiral barcode’ for uniquely identifying the adsorbed chiral molecule. We show applicability of the platform by analyzing and generating unique chirality-based barcodes for an enantiomeric pair of small molecules, as well as a pair of spectrally similar larger chiral biomolecules based on very low volumes of analytes at ultra-low concentrations.�

The sensing platform is made of specially engineered nanopatterned gold where the interactions between the plasmonic and photonic cavity modes produce strong chiral “superchiral� light, he says.

By changing the geometrical parameters, 25 of such spectrally de-tuned sensors in 5×5 array was produced. When a molecule is added to this array, each sensing element produces slightly different chiral response, resulting in a unique barcode.

“Unlike other existing platforms that require chiral nanostructures of varying asymmetries that can be difficult to replicate, our proposed system’s inherent achirality overcomes this problem, greatly simplifying the fabrication process,� says Aritra Biswas ’12MS ’24PhD, postdoctoral fellow and lead author of the paper. “Additionally, the sensors are fabricated by simple nanoimprint lithography and two deposition steps, therefore making them very robust. We envision that such a versatile, low footprint, mass manufacturable platform would be a crucial tool for drug and biomolecular identification with applications in medical research and pharmaceutical industries.�

“We aim to contribute towards the development of inexpensive and sensitive chiral drug identification methods for chemical, biological and medical research, the fabrication of novel devices exhibiting superior light-matter interaction and the demonstration of a real product with commercial viability,� Chanda says.

Postdoctoral fellow Pablo Cencillo-Abad also contributed to the research and is listed as a study co-author.

Those interested in licensing this technology may .

Researcher’s Credentials:

Chanda has joint appointments in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s NanoScience Technology Center, Department of Physics and . He received his doctoral degree in photonics from the University of Toronto and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ in Fall 2012.

Mary Ann Reiner, standardized patient (SP) program manager, and Jennifer Neal, SP educator, received the Certified Healthcare Simulation Educator recognition, which affirms their expertise and proficiency in all aspects of medical simulation education.

The goal of simulation is simple, says Jason Konzelmann, director of the medical school’s : Simulate real world experiences so students can learn and practice their skills in a safe environment.

“Mary Ann and Jennifer’s dedication to advancing our simulation programs has now been formally acknowledged on an international level,� Konzelmann says, noting that SSH is the world’s largest organization dedicated to healthcare simulation.

“Medicine is changing so quickly,� says Reiner, who oversees 91 standardized patients ranging in age from 19 to 81. “It’s our responsibility to develop high-quality simulations that allow students to practice their clinical and procedural skills as well as communication and critical thinking.�

Neal says that she loves seeing students’ progress and gain confidence in their medical knowledge and ability to connect with patients.

“Working with simulated and standardized patients gives them the opportunity to see how real people react to them and to their questions,� she says. “They see what works and what doesn’t, all in a safe place.�

Konzelmann came to Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ with his SSH certifications, so this recognition triples the number of certified educators at the simulation center. This year’s Healthcare Simulation Week, held from Sept. 16-20, carries the theme of Launchpad to Legacy: What’s Your Next? In addition to supporting SSH certifications for more staff, Konzelmann’s goal is to obtain accreditation for the entire staff.

“Accreditation for the center, like certification for our team, can only serve to elevate our program and further enhance the overall reputation of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine,â€� he says.

As part of that effort, Clinical Skills and Simulation team members will present in nine different sessions and engage with simulation faculty and staff from around the world at the 25th annual International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare conference held in Orlando, Florida, Jan. 10-14, 2025.

The selected fellows — Vladimir Boginski, Nichole Lighthall and Dinender Singla — will develop and implement programs that can help improve faculty grant success and accelerate the growth of the research enterprise.

Topics the fellows will focus on include research infrastructure, proposal development and specific research awards.

The fellowship begins in Fall 2024 and will continue through Summer 2025.

Meet the new Research Faculty Fellows:

Vladimir Boginski

Professor of industrial engineering and management systems and co-director of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s Applied Operations Research Laboratory

How does it feel to be selected as a faculty fellow?

I am honored to be selected by the Office of Research as one of the faculty fellows this academic year. I am looking forward to the opportunity to use my experience in conducting interdisciplinary research and participating in large multi principal investigator grants to help Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½Â reach its strategic goals in terms of research funding and expenditures.

How do you hope to use this fellowship to further your research?

I hope that my experience in this role will be beneficial to my own research program development. I view this fellowship as a “two-way” opportunity. On one hand, I will be happy to offer my experience with various aspects of large grants and use it to the benefit of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ achieving strategic funding goals. On the other hand, I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the high-level strategic and administrative aspects of sponsored research that the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ Office of Research deals with. In addition, it would be very interesting to learn about Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ faculty research in various fields and potentially identify new opportunities for interdisciplinary research. Therefore, I believe that this fellowship would be beneficial both to my own academic research career and to Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½.

What is your background in research and what does your work focus on?

My research background and interests are in the broad area of network science and engineering. Networks are everywhere in the modern world: application areas are abundant, spanning the domains of big data and physical/virtual complex systems. Examples of real-world networked systems include communication networks, interdependent infrastructure networks, social networks, biological networks, financial networks and many others. Because everything is connected in one way or another, my research spans a multitude of disciplines. Although specific details of my research may vary depending on the field, the underlying broad goals are often the same: to identify nodes and links that are critical for the integrity of a network, and to optimize the connections so that each system functions more efficiently.

What else should Knight Nation know about you?

Prior to joining Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½, I was a faculty member at the University of Florida, and during my academic career I have served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on multiple grants for over $16 million. I have always valued the exposure to research disciplines different from my own background, and I was honored be nominated to participate in the Frontiers of Engineering program administered by the National Academy of Engineering, which connects and facilitates collaborations between engineers across different fields. In this fellowship role, I hope to participate in initiatives to promote interdisciplinary research collaborations between Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ faculty.

Nichole Lighthall

Associate professor of psychology, lab director of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s Adult Development and Decision Lab and associate program director of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s Human Factors and Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. Program

How does it feel to be selected as a faculty fellow?

I feel honored to be selected — and excited to have the opportunity to train in university leadership. The primary feeling has been joy over getting to work with Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ faculty who want to gain more skills and success in grant development. I’ve already gotten involved in the Office of Research’s Grant Writing Academy and the faculty in that program are so motivated and excited about their research. It’s going to be very fulfilling to help them achieve their goals.

How do you hope to use this fellowship to further your research?

My primary goal for the fellowship is to enhance Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½’s success in securing funding from The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and generally expand its health-related research portfolio. As a cognitive neuroscientist working in cognitive aging, I depend on NIH funding to conduct my research. So, any success toward my fellowship goal will help my research program grow as well.

What is your background in research and what does your work focus on?

I have been studying cognitive aging since I was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley over 20 years ago. Over time, my research interest came to focus on how decision-making changes in healthy aging and neurodegenerative diseases. Most recently, my lab has been trying to understand risk factors for financial exploitation in older adults, and how we can better protect seniors from scams and fraud. To address these questions, we use behavioral and neuroimaging approaches, but also consider social and health factors that might make some seniors more vulnerable.

What else should Knight Nation know about you?If you want help with developing your own NIH grants or have ideas for initiatives that we should develop to support NIH-funded research at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ — please reach out to me. I’m here to help you!

Dinender Singla

Professor of medicine, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ cardiovascular division leader and Florida Hospital chair in cardiovascular science

How does it feel to be selected as a faculty fellow?

Being selected as a faculty fellow is an extraordinary accomplishment, and I am deeply grateful for this opportunity. I feel a profound sense of pride in this achievement and am eager to contribute to the institution and its faculty.

How do you hope to use this fellowship to further your research?

This fellowship will enhance my in-depth research knowledge as I meet different faculty members, unit chairs, and deans. I took this position primarily because I want to serve the faculty at large, and I am keen to see their growth. This role allows me to mentor and guide other unit faculty, inspiring them to reach their full potential. The faculty growth is essential and will positively impact the lives of countless postdoctoral fellows and students. These insights and expertise will be highly valuable and will carry weight in shaping the future direction of different colleges, and university, which will ultimately support our community.

What is your background in research and what does your work focus on?

I have over 25 years of research experience in basic and translational research in cardiovascular sciences. I have brought more than $12 million in NIH grant funding to Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½. My major research area is stem cells and their derived exosomes for treating diabetes and anti-cancer drugs-induced cardiotoxicity. We have recently prepared specialized exosomes which can target tumors and kill them. Additionally, we have prepared exosomes to deliver drugs in the heart. This new research will lead to treat cancer patients more precisely. I am head of the Division of Metabolic and Cardiovascular Sciences in the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, which is part of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Medicine.

But when people experience a debilitating medical condition such as a stroke or loss of a limb, these same everyday tasks may become a struggle.

Qiushi Fu, a professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering within the College of Engineering and Computer Science, aims to alleviate such struggles with his new research on bimanual coordination that began in March as part of a National Institutes of Health grant.

Fu is observing how people interact with tasks that require coordinating two limbs, each controlling a robotic device, to complete a task within a virtual environment. The catch is that his task simulations will randomly impede his trial participants and lead them to decide how to compensate for the constraint placed upon one or more limbs.

However, there will be much more practical activities, too, Fu says.

“It’s important to go beyond experimental tasks and have participants perform actual real-life tasks,� he says. “We also want to measure coordination in everyday tasks like buttoning or cutting a piece of paper with motion tracking technologies.�

Fu proposes that the knowledge gained in this project can provide significant insight to improve the effectiveness of motor rehabilitation interventions for restoring upper-limb function in individuals affected by neurological disorders.

“The objective of this is research is we want to understand how our brain controls our two hands to work on a task with a common goal,� he says. “One example is you’re pouring water from a bottle to a cup. So, imagine the hand holding the cup is being pushed by something. To successfully perform the task is to move the hand back or move the pouring hand, or both.�

The research will use healthy young participants to perform those activities while their brain activity is monitored to acquire a foundational understanding of bimanual coordination, Fu says.

“If one hand makes a mistake or is impaired then the other can help compensate,� he says. “This is a decision the brain has to process, and we’re studying how the brain achieves this.�

Data will be gathered noninvasively, as participants will wear a fitted cap that will measure neural activity via electrodes. There also will be measurements of limb movements, muscle activities and eye movements to pair with the neural data.

Fu says he was motivated to investigate further when he noticed prior research on bimanual coordination primarily focused on tasks that require each limb to attain an independent goal rather than a common goal.

“None of these studies focused on how they complement each other,� Fu says. “I found that this particular topic wasn’t well understood, and in the past the research has focused on independent goal tasks, and our project focuses on common goal tasks.�

Although Fu is the principal investigator, he is collaborating with other Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ faculty within the Disability, Aging and Technology faculty cluster initiative to use their expertise in measuring brain activity for the research. He is also working with scientists at Arizona State University to apply neural stimulation to examine the functional role of a few different brain areas.

“We’re hoping our research will provide biomarkers and baseline data to further investigate into patient populations to perform rehabilitation interventions and even regain motor control,� Fu says.

Researcher’s Credentials

Fu came to Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ in 2018 as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering. He received his master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2008 before graduating with his Doctor of Biomedical Engineering from Arizona State University in 2013. Fu’s research focuses on rehabilitation, prosthetics, sensorimotor control, and bioinspired robots. He also is part of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s Biionix Cluster of interdisciplinary researchers, which brings together medical scientists and engineers to study and enhance high-tech medical technologies.

“He’s so soft,� said the 6-year-old from her bed at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Orlando. “I love him.�

Ion is a certified therapy dog. His owner, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ second-year-medical student Christa Zino, brings him to the hospital most Friday evenings to visit sick children.

“To see their faces light up is priceless,� she said.

Despite the rigors and “craziness� of medical school, Zino finds time to visit each week – even during final exams this month – because she remembers what it was like to be in the hospital for months at a time. When she was about 3 years old, Zino spent a better part of the year in and out of hospitals while doctors tried to figure out what was making the Apopka native sick.

“The only thing I remember with fondness about that year is the therapy dog visits,� she said. “And so I wanted to do something for children now, before I become a doctor and can help in other ways.�

The visits remind Zino why the 18-hour days of school and studying are all worth it.

“When I think it is too much and that I can’t handle everything, this reminds me that I have no problems and why I want to be a pediatric surgeon,� said the 27-year-old. “I want to help children like the ones I see every week.�

Faculty at the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine applaud Zino’s efforts, and there’s even a bonus for the school.

When Ion isn’t visiting children at Nemours or chasing his Chihuahua roommate at home, he’s lounging in the college’s Student Academic Support Services office.
That’s where he keeps office hours two days a week for stressed out medical students to stop by for doggy rubs or kisses before heading to their next class.

Ion during his “office hours” at the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine

For parents of children who spend extended time at Nemours for treatment of some of the most challenging conditions, the therapy dog visits are “magical.�

“She loves it when they visit,� said Katherine Vorkapich, Palmer’s mother, of Ion and the other 29 therapy animals registered to volunteer at Nemours.

Palmer is being treated for acute myeloid leukemia, also known as AML. The condition requires hospital stays of about a month after each session over a six-month stretch. The kindergartner and her family will be spending Christmas in the hospital this year.

“She just lights up,� Vorkapich said. “It’s a great change in the day. A lot of times, she doesn’t have visitors, so it is awesome they come in to see her.�

Nurses will stop Zino in the hallway and ask her to visit a patient’s room to help lift spirits, ease some stress before a procedure or simply hang out to help kick the blues that often hit when children are away from their homes.

Patients can also request a pet visit by tapping a button in the control console in their room. The console triggers an icon on the computer screen outside their room. As pet therapy handlers walk the halls, they know where to pop in for a visit.

“In my nine years at Nemours, I have seen over and over how our pet therapy dogs have a very special way of making children less anxious and often produce some smiles and giggles,� said Jill Mondry, director of volunteer services at Nemours. “They truly are important members of our care team.�

Ion seems to enjoy his job too. It’s a far cry from what destiny had originally planned for the pup, who Zino got from a rescue organization after he was turned over from someone out-of-state for not being aggressive enough to fight.

It’s obvious that Ion is a lover, not a fighter, Zino said.

“He gets so excited when his vest comes out. He knows where we are headed.�

Hospital Corporation of America and the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine, which established an internal medicine residency with the Orlando VA and Osceola Regional Medical Centers in 2013, are expanding their partnership to create more than 550 residency slots in hospitals across northern Florida. Some of the communities that will see new residents in training include Orlando, Gainesville and Ocala.

The new residencies will help fill a state and national need, and will also help address the doctor shortage in the Sunshine state. The doctor shortage impacts patients, which often must wait weeks to see doctors.

There are not enough residency slots in the nation for the number of medical school graduates each year, said Dr. Deborah German, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s vice president for medical affairs and founding dean of the College of Medicine. While 97 percent of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s medical school graduates find residencies, many qualified students do not simply because there are not enough spots, she said. After last year’s residency match, more than 600 U.S. medical school seniors were left without residency positions – effectively meaning they could not practice medicine after graduating with their M.D. degrees.

“We know that where a resident completes his or her program is usually where they decide to stay and work,� German said. “We are eager to partner with hospitals across our community and state to attract and retain more excellent doctors for Florida residents.�

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ President John C. Hitt said, “Our agreement with HCA shows how our students, community and state benefit from the power of partnerships. Together, we will produce more well-trained physicians who will care for patients in Central Florida and throughout our state.â€�

Michael Joyce, FACHE, president of HCA’s North Florida Division, agreed. “As part of the nation’s largest hospital network, HCA’s North Florida Division brings significant resources and a dedicated commitment to meeting Florida’s critical need for physicians by expanding access to medical residency programs,â€� he said “We are honored to partner with Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ to provide outstanding training and mentorship that will prepare the next generation of physicians to deliver the highest quality of patient care.â€�

The first step in the new effort will be operating four existing HCA residencies under the consortium and seeking any necessary re-accreditation from the national Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). The agreement will not change any existing HCA or Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ partnerships. Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ currently operates the Osceola Regional residency in a partnership with HCA and the Orlando VA Medical Center.

The two parties have pledged to continue working together to bring more residencies in Florida. They plan to establish new residency and fellowship training programs over the next five years that could bring total enrollment to more than 550 residents and fellows and graduate up to 150 physicians a year.

Florida’s need is great as the number of residencies has not kept pace with the state’s growing population and its increasing number of medical schools. Florida currently ranks 42 of the 50 states in the number of residents per 100,000 people.

Orlando Health CEO David Strong said innovative partnerships can help Florida create more residencies, especially those in high demand specialties. “We are excited about the common work we do to make Florida and our region a national leader in graduate medical education. Orlando Health has been and will continue to be an advocate and leader in graduate medical education,� he said.

Lars Houmann, President and CEO of Florida Hospital, said, “Since its inception, one of the most important goals of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine has been to increase the number of physicians in our state. Residencies are a vital part of the formula of training and retaining high-quality physicians and Florida Hospital is pleased to see progress toward that objective.â€�

Tim Liezert, who directs the Orlando VA Medical Center, said his hospital’s two-year-old internal medicine residency with the medical school and HCA’s Osceola Regional Medical center has provided great benefits to physicians-in-training and patients. “We are eager to create more collaborations like these for our veterans and the community at large,� he said.