The Injury Science Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP), provides a personalized internship experience to a diverse pool of talented interns with the aim of inspiring the pursuit of careers in science, technology, and engineering. The ten week summer program engages undergraduate students in foundational research experiences, one-on-one faculty mentorship, workshops, meetings, and field trips at CIRP. The program serves to provide women and underrepresented interns and those from STEM-limited programs with inspiration to pursue advanced science or engineering degrees, increase knowledge and interest in science and engineering, gain professional development, develop the ability to solve real-world problems, and prepare to optimize technology for safety solutions through user-centered, participatory design and human factors research. This program is active at a time when the country and world are on the brink of safety transformations enabled by technology, making the imperative for our training all the more critical for our country. Injuries and violence remain the leading causes of death and acquired disability for children, youth and young adults in the United States and worldwide, and remains the CIRP REU intellectual focus. This work supports the UN and World Health Assembly resolution on child injury prevention that highlighted an urgent, unfilled need for child-specific injury prevention research and people trained to meet this challenge.
The Injury Science REU Site goals for its interns include: 1) provide foundational research experiences that inspire women and underrepresented interns and those from STEM-limited programs to pursue advanced engineering degrees, 2) increase knowledge and interest in engineering and science 3) increase knowledge and interest in injury science/engineering 4) provide professional development 5) develop ability to solve real-world problems, and 6) prepare to optimize technology for safety solutions through user-centered, participatory design and human factors research. The program's in-discipline mentorship is complemented by an interdisciplinary exposure to give the interns the broad perspective in human subjects research, ethics, human factors, user-centered design, community-based participatory research, data science and entrepreneurship. Interns participate in traditional discipline-specific, lab-based training (intellectual foundation research) while also gaining the real-world exposure needed to deeply understand injury problems in order to create widely adopted, impactful solutions (translational research). They also learn industry/university partnership methods by working alongside entrepreneurs, industry, government and healthcare as well as with youth, families and their communities (broader impacts research).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
