The application of machine learning and precision robotics in medicine is rapidly changing the landscape of
technologies available to the surgeon in the operating room. This rise in advanced surgical technologies has
created an environment that demands collaboration between engineering researchers and medical
practitioners; it also requires a convergent approach to integrate the legal, ethical, societal, and economic
considerations into future developments of beneficial surgical technologies.
Current models of graduate education and training do not provide the necessary framework for students to
excel at this interface of medicine and engineering. Although engineering students receive thorough
background training in technical and problem-solving skill-sets, relevant to development of technologies that
could be applicable to the operating room, very few have access to the guidance or opportunity to discuss the
medical needs and applications with medical practitioners, patients, or to visit an operating room to better
understand surgical barriers, challenges, or constraints of the technologies they design. To address these
limitations in graduate education at the intersection of engineering and medicine, we need to train engineers
to understand and have direct experience with the emerging socio-technological-medical application landscape
as well as the risks and benefits of new technologies. Training at this level of convergence requires increased
interactions between students, the providers who will test these technologies, and the end-users (i.e.,
practitioners and patients) for whom these technologies are developed to better understand the impact of these
technologies on patients’ well-being.
At Duke University, the engineering and medical schools are separated by a single road - Research Drive. The
vision for this certificate is to provide a new training framework for engineering and computer science graduate
students, to “cross the road,” both literally and figuratively, into the other disciplines to design advanced surgical
technologies that considers provider, societal, end-user, and patient needs in their development and testing.
This transdisciplinary training will provide a pathway for engineering and Computer Science graduate students
to design innovations in fundamentally new technologies to advance surgical practice, an engineering training
pathway which otherwise does not formally exist at Duke. Furthermore, by partnering engineering students
with medical students to gain perspectives into each other’s fields as well the challenges, benefits and tradeoffs
between design potentials and real-world medical needs, innovation in surgical technology can be achieved
with greater patient and societal benefits. MEMS will serve as the host departments, but primary faculty and interested students also come from ECE and CEE.