We submit an interdisciplinary NeuroEngineering program with the goal of educating and training future generations of scientists, educators and innovators. We build on 16 years of experience with neuroengineering training and more than 60 years of Biomedical Engineering predoctoral training. The program’s most salient feature is a rich educational and collaborative research environment straddling both the engineering and medical schools. For example, our students acquire depth in the biological sciences through courses in the medical school or arts and sciences, and quantitative and computational sciences through courses in the engineering school. The emerging transformative change is the opportunity to work with clinical scientists to translate the discoveries and bringing the innovations into practice. Mentors to the program are from Biomedical Engineering, other engineering departments, the Mind-Brain Institute, various clinical departments (Neurology, Neurosurgery, Otolaryngology, Radiology), the School of Arts and Sciences (Cognitive Sciences), and the Applied Physics Laboratory. Our research program is very well funded and we maintain an outstanding record of funding all trainees in future years. Our student pool has been exceptional in quality and growing; we continue to draw from a highly competitive national pool, and in recent years our efforts have yielded a very balanced gender pool and a remarkable growth in recruiting under-represented minority. For the current phase of the training program, we have added Clinical NeuroEngineering as a new track, implemented with the help of a number of highly regarded clinical faculty. We have addressed the student interest in translational research and careers, by adding a Translational NeuroEngineering track, involving entrepreneurial set of faculty. This is captured in a revised NeuroEngineering 2.0 curriculum, for example, by capturing the emerging trend (and current pandemic-related necessity) of distance learning, a distance learning (e-TRAIN) curriculum. We believe that this innovative curriculum will prepare our students in more diverse and exciting scientific careers, not only academia but also increasingly important careers in regulatory, industrial and entrepreneurial careers. A new student-led initiative has been the Translational NeuroEngineering (TNT) initiative that has spawned several exciting local mentoring and outreach activities. Building on this success, we will implement a new NeuroEngineering xTranslation (NExT) initiative to encourage and mentor trainees interested in entrepreneurial careers. We have increased our effort to promote diversity in our trainee pool, achieving gender parity, and a remarkable growth in under-represented minority (URM) recruiting. We have achieved this progress through a deep commitment, from early, pre- application, to late-phase ‘second look’ opportunities to educate and interest the URMs in our program. and University has poured significant resources for across the board enhancement of URM funding, faculty, and diversity initiatives. As the final step in the training journey, we will put in place a tight management and evaluation of outcomes through the NeuroFeedback (NErF) system involving our extensive alumni community.

We propose a predoctoral training program that integrates basic neurosciences, engineering and computational education, along with basic and translational research. Our proposed program includes five research focus areas (Neural Instrumentation, Neuroimaging, Neural Data Sciences, Systems Neuroscience and Clinical Neuroengineering) and three educational tracks: Basic Neuroengineering, Clinical Neuroengineering and Translational Neuroengineering. To provide the diverse opportunities, we take advantage of our long-standing institutional culture that integrates engineering with medicine. We aim to recruit from the top trainee pool, expand our efforts to maintain diversity and provide access and opportunities to under-represented minority, and prepare the trainees for diverse scientific careers in basic research and translation via different educational streams and through continuous mentoring, oversight, and feedback.