Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will offer a joint PhD program in health sciences engineering beginning in the fall semester of 2025. RPI is a world-renowned technological research university known for its engineering, technology, and science programs. Icahn Mount Sinai is the academic arm of the Mount Sinai Health System, which includes eight hospitals and a vast network of ambulatory practices throughout the greater New York City region. The PhD program will focus on reparative and regenerative medicine, immunoengineering, and neuroengineering.
In the first year of the program, students will be immersed in engineering at RPI in Troy, New York, through coursework and research training that includes design thinking, introduced through process and product design and open-ended problem solving. The year will conclude with students experiencing clinical shadowing at Icahn Mount Sinai.
In the second year, students will be trained in entrepreneurship and commercialization at the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM). CEPM, created in 2022 , is a partnership between RPI and Icahn Mount Sinai and represents one of the first life science centers of its kind in New York City and the nation to integrate engineering and biomedical sciences with education, training, and research collaborations to radically improve human health. In this year of training, students will be exposed to a hands-on industrial internship in entrepreneurship.
"By combining engineering, commercialization, and medical training with exposure to real-life clinicians and patients, RPI and Icahn Mount Sinai will produce a new breed of medical innovators capable of addressing unmet clinical needs," said RPI President Martin A. Schmidt, PhD. "Our PhD students will be uniquely positioned to contribute to the next generation of precision diagnostics and therapeutics to address cancer, Alzheimer's, infectious diseases, and more."
"Our major innovations in medicine have often resulted from a close collaboration between engineers and clinicians coming together to better understand and optimize human health. Bringing together interdisciplinary engineering and clinical skills will give our next generation of biomedical researchers a significant advantage as they seek solutions to modern health problems," said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and president for academic affairs of the Mount Sinai Health System.
From the beginning, a translational mindset will be emphasized in students to encourage innovation that can be taken from the laboratory to the market. Students will experience Grand Rounds to learn about the need for new medical innovations and keep up with the latest advances. They will participate in health hackathons that bring together people with different backgrounds to address challenges, and they will have PhD committees with expertise in engineering, biomedical sciences, clinical medicine, and entrepreneurship.
"Through this PhD program, top students will be connected with the resources they need to become leading life science entrepreneurs, researchers, and medical professionals," said Deepak Vashishth, PhD, co-director of CEPM. "I look forward to the advances in patient care that will inevitably result from this well-rounded program and partnership between RPI and Icahn Mount Sinai."
"Through a carefully designed curriculum focused on translational thinking, we are equipping students with the specialized training to apply engineering design principles to make a direct impact on human health," said Priti Balchandani, PhD, Professor of Diagnostic, Molecular, and Interventional Radiology at Icahn Mount Sinai, who serves as co-director of CEPM.
Specifically, the PhD program will feature four modular core courses on fundamental approaches in precision medicine with an emphasis on engineering design, translation, and commercialization. It will also feature Sinai BioDesign and RPI Inventor's Studio courses, in which students identify unmet health needs, use engineering design approaches to invent technologies to address the needs, and devise strategies to implement those solutions in a target market.
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