The program is directed by Grady Rylander (UT Austin) (Area: Instrumentation, Devices, and Contrast Agents) and Mia K. Markey (UT Austin) (Area: Informatics). The expertise of Drs. Rylander and Markey represents the two extremes of the trajectory from image formation to analysis and decision-making and as such ensures that the training program is balanced.
Grady Rylander has taught instrumentation at UT Austin the past 28 years and has an active research program funded by the NIH to develop spectral-domain polarization-sensitive OCT for glaucoma diagnosis. Past research includes development of a robotic laser delivery system, bio-mimetic sensors, and imaging systems used in ophthalmology. As a practicing ophthalmologist, he has used instrumentation in clinical medicine for 31 years. He has graduated 10 Ph.D. students and 39 M.S. students.
Mia K. Markey currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in biostatistics, including the core BME graduate course on this topic. She has been recognized for her dedication to teaching and advising by the UT (undergraduate) Student Engineering Council, UT Graduate Engineering Council, and American Association for Engineering Education, Gulf-Southwest Section. Dr. Markey’s research goal is to develop computational decision aids to help physicians better diagnose, treat, and manage cancer. Her work on quantifying the aesthetic outcomes of breast reconstruction is currently funded by the NIH. Dr. Markey has been recognized for her contributions to biomedical informatics with the 2006 New Investigator Award from the American Medical Informatics Association.
The program directors are assisted by three committees, an external advisory board, and an administrative assistant. These committees meet quarterly or more frequently as needed to fulfill their responsibilities.
a. The Executive Steering Committee is responsible for providing oversight and programmatic vision. A primary responsibility will be to select new program faculty and to approve the faculty advisor and co-advisor for each trainee. This committee has the authority to approve new classes in the primary instruction areas and examines each trainee’s class selection to be certain the curriculum is consistent with the trainee’s research and career goals. This committee is also responsible for evaluation of the program objectives. Toward this aim, the program takes advantage of existing quality assurance infrastructure implemented in the BME and ECE departments to document the process of continuous improvement for the national accreditation system of undergraduate engineering programs, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). End-of-course student evaluations will be conducted each semester to collect both Likert-scale and open-ended student feedback. A member of the Executive Steering Committee and the Director of the College of Engineering’s (COE) Faculty Innovation Center (FIC), Dr. Kathy Schmidt, will conduct peer observations of at least one class session of each required course each semester. Membership of the Executive Steering Committee consists of the program director, co-director, and representatives from BME, ECE, UT Austin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), and UT Austin Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ICMB In addition, trainees will elect a student representative to the Executive Steering Committee.
b. The Trainee Recruitment and Admissions Committee are responsible for recruiting policies and soliciting applications from historically under-represented minorities. All trainees must first be admitted to the either the BME or ECE department, including those students in an M.D./Ph.D. program. This committee will examine applicant files of the subset of BME and ECE students interested in imaging sciences. The committee will make offers for prospective students to visit the campus during the spring. This committee is also responsible for coordinating recruitment activities throughout the year. Committee membership consists of the two PIs and a representative (graduate advisor) from ECE and BME.
c. The Industrial and Governmental Liaison Committee works with Dr. Jack Hart (UT Austin) who is the Assistant Chair of the BME Department. The BME Department established the Industry Affiliates (IA) Program in 2002. There are currently eleven members in the program. IA members provide annual membership dues and/or in-kind services to the Department and play a vital role in making the Department a success for students and faculty alike. Membership dues from the IAs help to fund the Department Seminar Series, the Graduate Student Recruiting Week, and numerous student activities, including the BME Honor Society, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and other student organizations. The IAs also participate in the Classroom Visiting Lecture Program, provide valuable input on curriculum and program accreditation issues, and have provided summer internship positions for students as well as permanent employment for our BME graduates. The PIs meet with Dr. Hart and three IA members each spring to determine which summer internships will be available to our trainees and to be advised on program outcomes.
d. The External Advisory Board meets annually to review the performance of the training program and make both oral and written recommendations for improvement to the Executive Steering Committee. Membership consists of two industrial representatives, a representative from a minority-serving institution such as UTSA or PVAMU, and two representatives from schools with established imaging training programs (e.g., UCLA, USC, Washington Univ., MIT).
e. Administrative Assistant. A half-time administrative assistant is needed to maintain student records, coordinate seminars, arrange for travel and housing for summer internships, coordinate meetings, maintain records for program assessment, etc. The administrative assistant will prepare a quarterly newsletter about the activities of the training program and distribute the newsletter to faculty and students in the BME and ECE departments.
Program outcomes will be measured and used to improve the training program. Some of the commonly used internal assessment metrics include: student end-of-course evaluations, student interviews each semester with PIs, student performance in industrial and research internships and quantifiable measures of the research experience such as publications and patents. Connolly recognized the importance of formal assessment of doctoral education and the Whitaker report specifically addressed the strengths and weaknesses of graduate imaging training programs. The Connolly report states: “not only are student outcomes data important measures of the educational process but the act of conducting the assessments themselves precipitates crucial conversations among stakeholders about the ends and means of educational programs.” Bunda and Bilder discussed the challenges in assessing outcomes in graduate and professional education in general and a recent report from the National Academies describes the difficulties and opportunities for improvement in evaluating outcomes of interdisciplinary research and teaching. Despite these challenges, our program assessment includes both internal and external, formative and summative performance measures. Dr. Michael Dailey, a consultant in the assessment of higher education programs, developed a set of metrics used in the evaluation of the UT NSF-IGERT program on optical molecular imaging.
The program assessment approach will encompass both formative and summative evaluation as defined by Scriven. Formative evaluation will be gathered as the program progresses in order to improve the quality of the outcomes and processes. Summative evaluation, collected as the program is in its final stages, will provide overall results. The assessment will address these fundamental questions: (a) Are we appropriately using resources and opportunities? (b) Which strategies or procedures should be tried? (c) How adequately are our strategies or procedures working? (d) How effectively are the goals and objectives being accomplished? In order to answer these questions, evaluation data will include a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures in order to obtain a more comprehensive view of the strengths and weaknesses of the processes and outcomes. Appendix C provides a summary of the project activities, intended student outcomes, and evaluation instruments.
Ongoing monitoring of the activities will include the development of formative and summative reports to keep the project’s staff informed of revisions and results of the different initiatives. Dr. Kathy Schmidt will evaluate the core classes and give feedback directly to the core instructors and the Executive Steering Committee. The External Advisory Board will also evaluate the five core classes and the quality of the research experience and make written and oral recommendations to the Executive Steering Committee. These recommendations along with the internal assessment will be used by the Executive Steering Committee to improve the training experience. It is also important to disseminate the results of our program assessment to the broader community. We will submit a paper/talk on the program evaluation to the ASEE Annual Meeting or the ASEE Gulf-Southwest regional meeting.
The primary program outcome is for our students to acquire the skill set needed to improve healthcare through imaging science. This program outcome can best be measured by assessing student knowledge and application of imaging science to clinical medicine. This primary program outcome is difficult to quantitatively measure since the impact that our trainees will have on clinical medicine may be decades after graduation. Some qualitative assessment may be possible based on the research topics that the students choose and the projected impact that those projects have on clinical medicine. Even if a viable “relevance” score can be computed for research projects, it is possible that student’s impact on clinical medicine is proactively not calculable.
Certification for completion of the portfolio program will be done by the two program directors.
Relationship to the student’s degree program
The proposed portfolio program is a cluster of classes and research experiences that a subset of graduate BME and ECE students might take as part of their PhD training.
Expected enrollment
Based on a survey of students currently in the BME and ECE graduate programs, we expect about 40 students interested in imaging science to enroll in the Portfolio Program.