Looking back and forging ahead: IHSI celebrates 10 years of health at Illinois

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this fall, recognizing a decade of important achievements and milestones for both the institute and the university.

Established as an initiative in 2014, and later gaining institute status in 2017, IHSI is one of 10 campuswide research institutes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign transcending disciplinary boundaries to elevate ideas, drive discovery, and push the limits of our knowledge.

IHSI Interim Director Stephen Boppart, Grainger Distinguished Chair of Engineering and professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, has been an Illinois faculty member for nearly 25 years. During this time, he has played a significant role in building interdisciplinary collaboration, fostering connections between academic, industry, entrepreneurial, and clinical partners, and advancing translational research.

“IHSI fills a critical niche and role on campus, championing the impact that innovations can have on our health and the human condition,” Boppart said. “By being positioned with a vision and mission to look broadly across all campus research and educational units, IHSI can bring people together from not only Illinois, but also from academic, community, industry, and clinical partners to address the health challenges that we face as individuals, as communities, and globally.”

IHSI launched in 2014 as a campus strategic initiative to better coordinate major research and outreach efforts in health toward a significant and visible societal impact. With health’s many dimensions, broad scope, and significance to all people, the university recognized that society’s greatest health challenges would have to be addressed through interdisciplinary collaboration, translational partnerships, and innovation.

Under the leadership of professor and inaugural director Neal Cohen, IHSI moved forward with this charge, establishing the Carle Illinois Research Affiliation, including the joint management of the Biomedical Research Center, and becoming the home for the Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance for Technology-Based Healthcare. The Alliance, founded in 2010, had already launched several joint research projects, established its educational mission, and built trusted relationships with NCSA for high-performance computing and analysis. Bryan White, a professor of animal sciences, directed the Alliance for Illinois until his retirement in 2019.

In addition to management of clinical and translational partnerships, research development has been a long-standing cornerstone of IHSI. Three research development specialists were initially hired to support grant-seeking efforts and build interdisciplinary collaborations across specific areas of research: clinical and translational neuroscience, precision medicine, and cancer. Maggie Berg, now Senior Research Development Manager at IHSI, launched IHSI’s foundational faculty development program, the NIH Grant Writing Series, in 2015. She continues to lead this popular program.

“Writing grants for the NIH can be tricky. We had a really good opportunity to kind of demystify that whole process, from finding funding all the way through submitting and possibly resubmitting,” Berg said. “I think the NIH Grant Writing Series has really helped us to build lasting relationships with a lot of our health sciences faculty.”

Today, IHSI’s research development team, under the leadership of Senior Director for Research and Core Development Gill Snyder (who was first hired as a research development specialist in 2015), drives and supports interdisciplinary research and innovation across all areas of health, complemented by expertise in health equity and community-academic partnerships. Berg has continued to lead faculty development programs, launching the DoD Grant Seeking Workshop in 2021, and the Emerging Research Leaders Academy in 2023.

“One of the best things about the team at IHSI is their ability to adapt to emerging priorities, to lead initiatives that some think impossible, and to build partnerships across the campus, community, and beyond. This ‘can-do’ attitude makes IHSI the place to turn when you need a trusted partner to accelerate health research and innovation,” Snyder said.

As IHSI has continued to grow, so has Illinois’ health ecosystem. The Carle Illinois College of Medicine became the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine in 2015, welcoming its first class in 2018, the Cancer Community grew into the Cancer Center at Illinois, and health technology has become a key area of growth and collaboration for the College of Applied Health Sciences. The Health Sciences Strategy Task Force, led by IHSI, captured many of these strengths and opportunities as part of its vision for The Next 150 strategic plan.

The Health Sciences Strategy Task Force recognized a need at Illinois for increased shared infrastructure for clinical and translational research. IHSI responded with a biostatistics core, now known as BERD, to provide expert biostatistical consulting and analysis services in support of health-related research, and Illinois REDCap, launched in partnership with Research IT via the Office of the Chief Information Officer and the University Library, to offer a flexible data management platform within a HIPAA-capable environment.

In 2020, Illinois REDCap became one of many campus resources used for the SHIELD: Target, Test, Tell program – the large-scale, team-based effort mounted by the university and its partners during the COVID-19 pandemic. IHSI also played a leadership role in SHIELD CU, designed to broaden the impact of SHIELD within the Champaign-Urbana community. The journey and events of the 2020-21 school year were later detailed in a brief documentary.

“Multidisciplinary approaches to solving a complex issue are part of our DNA,” said Chancellor Robert Jones in a News Bureau article. “That really did play out in the way that we created the COVID-19 saliva-based test.”

In 2022, Boppart became interim director of IHSI, while also leading the Chancellor’s Health Innovation Visioning Committee, and serving as the Illinois chair of the Mayo Clinic & Illinois Alliance. His leadership of IHSI came around the same time as the establishment of a new research funding agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), to accelerate high-impact solutions to the most challenging health problems. IHSI has led Illinois’ efforts to respond to the mission of ARPA-H, including being selected as a spoke for both the ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub and Customer Experience Hub.

“Illinois’ innovative, interdisciplinary approach to health is perfectly matched with ARPA-H,” said Susan Martinis, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Illinois, in an IHSI announcement about the ARPA-H hub membership.

As IHSI moves into the future, Boppart is encouraged by the strong collaborations and campuswide progress made toward greater impact in health.

“One of the central themes that emerged from the work of the Chancellor’s Health Innovation Visioning Committee was that every research and academic unit across campus plays a role in improving or enriching the human condition, whether that be physically, mentally, or intellectually, and whether that be for individuals, our communities, or our world. Our future health and well-being will be defined by our collaborative, interdisciplinary innovations that will provide the solutions to the health challenges we face. The next ten years of IHSI are poised to not only build on the momentum that has been generated, but also realize the successful translation and impact of our health science and technology research at Illinois.