Welcome to the first edition of the Innovation Center newsletter! As a valued member of our community, we aim to give you a peek into the ideas, projects, and people shaping innovation across our interdisciplinary labs, classes, and partnerships. We’re also excited to announce the launch of our newly redesigned website. Stay tuned for regular highlights and updates from the Innovation Center. 

Breaking ground in summer 2025 on our new facility, we’re excited to expand our physical footprint and deepen our impact to ignite student success across campus and beyond. This state-of-the-art building will provide additional corporate lab spaces, collaborative workspaces, and flexible classrooms designed to foster creativity and hands-on learning. The expansion represents a significant investment in our community’s future, empowering the next generation of innovators to thrive.

Rendering of UIC Innovation Center from JGMA 

Since 2018, the Innovation Center has partnered closely with OSF HealthCare to improve healthcare delivery and access. In summer 2024, we started a project looking into possible connections between environmental factors impacting healthcare decision-making. 

What factors influence healthcare barriers in people's lives, and what are tangible examples of where people are, where they go for care, and what they even consider healthcare to mean? Using Card Sort, a research tool we developed to facilitate difficult conversations, community partners tell us stories by mapping out their health-related travel. Card Sort provides valuable insight into how people perceive complex topics, which in turn helps inform better design of services, systems, and tools. 

Partnering with the Children's Environmental Health Initiative (CEHI), directed by UIC Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda, brings deep expertise in environmental health and geospatial analysis, allowing researchers to examine how factors like pollution, transportation, and access to green space may influence healthcare decisions in underserved communities.

Mapping Project: Sprinterns

The Innovation Center hosted five Break Through Tech Sprinterns in an intensive, three-week internship designed for women and nonbinary students in computer science and tech fields, immersing them in a hands-on app-building project alongside the OSF mapping team. In a condensed period of time, they gained experience on a real-world project with a company in a fast-paced, innovative environment. 

The Sprinternship program is an important part of our commitment to building a more inclusive innovation ecosystem. By connecting students to meaningful, mission-driven work, we actively engage them in forward-thinking learning experiences that help shape the next generation of technologists, designers, and problem-solvers.

Sprinternship participants (L-R) Dhanu Kannan, Lexi Golley, Sanjana Balamurugan, and Alondra Flores, with Innovation Center staff Tomoko Kawanaka, Alexander Twaddle, and Evan McCarty, and participant Minh Nguyet. 

The Innovation Center is pleased to announce a new partnership with the UIC College of Medicine Peoria, led by Regional Dean Meenakshy Aiyer, MD. This partnership will advance healthcare innovation and education through interdisciplinary collaboration with COMP faculty and researchers.

Faculty, learners, and community partners gathered on May 1 at Distillery Labs in downtown Peoria to celebrate this collaboration. The event featured a panel of speakers—including Matt Bramlet, MD, Girish Deshpande, MD, and Jonathan Fisher, PhD—facilitated by Charles Frisbie, Medical Device Labs Director at the Innovation Center. You can learn more about some of the innovative solutions discussed in this news story.

The inaugural project supported through this partnership is an AI-enabled technology to more quickly and accurately diagnose respiratory issues in children, led by Dr. Adam Cross, Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics. Dr. Cross (COMP) and Charles Frisbie (Innovation Center) were awarded $25K through the Chancellor’s Translational Research Initiative (CTRI) to further develop the prototype and complete an FDA Pre-Submission.

Innovation Day panelists Matt Bramlet, MD, Girish Deshpande, MD, and Jonathan Fisher, PhD, with panel facilitator Charles Frisbie.

The Innovation Center runs an interdisciplinary solution development class (IXD) that brings together multiple academic units (design, engineering, liberal arts and sciences) into one class to work on real-world problems in team settings.

This fall, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Karen Colley is sponsoring a class to answer the question: "What does successful education at UIC look like?”

Students will explore and tell the administration what their expectations are; why they are here; where they expect to be after graduation; what their families expect; how it’s all working for them, and what a new imagined future could look like. This is done through human-centered research and analysis— interviewing students, administrators, family, etc., and presenting alternatives to the Provost and other key leaders.

The class is open to LAS sophomores, juniors, and seniors with an interest in anthropology or human-centered studies, as well as interested students in other disciplines. They will be paired with senior-level students from the School of Design in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts to deliver student-led insights and potential solutions. Register for ANTH 490.