Faculty: Ideas are being born in new Bioengineering Research Incubator

The college’s brand-new Bioengineering Research incubator is a testament to what can happen when vision, collaboration, determination and resources come together. The interdisciplinary facility, which was established this academic year with internal CSUN funding and space allocated by CECS, is the brainchild of assistant professors Ani Nahapetian (computer science) and George Youssef (mechanical engineering), who conceived the idea and are its codirectors.

“It’s a way of accommodating students who are interested in bioengineering while pursuing related majors,” explains Nahapetian. “We wanted to pull them together into an incubator space where ideas come out of collaboration, conversations and trying to engineer solutions from software and hardware. With these interactions, students and faculty advisors will work on new and interesting solutions to bioengineering research problems. The goal is to have students take the work to publication and maybe commercialize it as well.”

The incubator space is a development environment, outfitted with a number of computational devices, an ECG, pulse oximeter, pressure sensors, heart rate monitors, sensor-actuator devices, and a Sphero Ball that can be programmed for functionality. Before they can be part of the incubator, however, students must have a faculty advisor and a project that has been fully fleshed out. The projects are not part of any course, and the facility is not limited to CECS students—it is open to anyone on campus who wants to take part and meets the criteria.

“We’ve aimed to have people with various areas of expertise on campus come together in the incubator, so the interdisciplinary aspect of the collaboration leads to better solutions to bioengineering problems,” Nahapetian says.

Already a dozen students, both graduate and undergraduate, are taking advantage of the facility. For many it is a training ground, while others are using it to work on research related to their master’s theses.

Nahapetian and Youssef hope to use the incubator as a launching pad for other projects. The long-term goal is to train students to enter the bioengineering workforce and increase their exposure to local, international and national companies.

For more information about the Bioengineering Research Incubator, see
https://www.ecs.csun.edu/incubator/index.html.