The NIH Research Education Program (R25) supports research educational activities that complement other formal training programs in the mission areas of the NIH Institutes and Centers.

The overarching goal of this R25 program is to support educational activities that complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs.

To accomplish the stated over-arching goal, this FOA will support creative educational activities with a primary focus on:

• Courses for Skills Development: For example, courses and programs that use a team-based design approach which incorporates health equity, universal design (the purposeful design of products and environments to be useable by people of varying abilities and characteristics), design concepts early in educational activities, interaction between design students at different career/education levels, and state-of-the-art best practices (such as multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary education, the regulatory pathway and other issues related to the commercialization of medical devices), and further enhances these with novel creative and/or ground-breaking approaches and activities which will be implemented and evaluated with the goal of disseminating the outcomes for the benefit of the larger biomedical engineering education community. Programs may also include a clinical immersion experience that enhances skills and experiences in needs finding, communication across disciplines (including with healthcare providers, patients, caregivers, and/or communities), ideation coupled with frequent clinical/user feedback, and/or small projects to address minor, immediately solvable needs.
• NIBIB Statement of Interest: NIBIB interests include the development and integration of advanced bioengineering, sensing, imaging, and computational technologies for the improvement of human health and medical care. With this FOA, in addition to the goals described above NIBIB especially encourages courses and programs that incorporate the following topics: 1) Expanding the design perspective by designing for low resource settings; 2) Expanding the clinical immersion perspective by incorporating community-based engagement or emphasizing problem driven solutions; and, 3) Expanding the team perspective by including students from disciplines such as nursing, computer engineering, data science, and/or public health, as well as different education levels.

Research education programs may complement ongoing research training and education occurring at the applicant institution, but the proposed educational experiences must be distinct from those training and education programs currently receiving Federal support. Individuals selected for participation in this program must be undergraduate students majoring or minoring in biomedical engineering/bioengineering.