VinUniversity and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) announced the opening of the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC), which will focus on interdisciplinary research in biotechnology and data science. VISHC was officially given 13,5 million USD in funding from Vingroup to develop affordable and accessible projects that can positively impact people’s health.

In the past 2 years, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps and deficits in many countries’ healthcare systems, including countries with the most advanced healthcare industries. Because of this, VinUni and UIUC have officially established VISHC to develop affordable and widely accessible smart health technologies to increase the efficiency of healthcare systems and support early diagnostics and treatment for everyone, everywhere.

VISHC will be supporting projects in the following fields: (i) development of point-of-care devices; (ii) remote care and diagnostics; (iii) wastewater epidemiological surveillance; (iv) federated machine learning in precision medicine.

Each VISHC research project will be led by at least one professor from VinUni and one professor from UIUC. All VinUni students and fellows that participate in research at VISHC will have the opportunity to study and research at UIUC for 1 to 2 years. UIUC students will similarly be able to work for 1 to 2 years at VinUni. VISHC will train 50 Master’s students, 50 Ph.D. students, and 10 Postdoctoral Scholars at both VinUni and UIUC in key science and technology fields for smart healthcare. This collaboration promises to bring about outstanding results by utilizing the strengths of both partner organizations. UIUC is a renowned university with over 150 years of experience in science and technology research with great real-world applications. According to USNews 2022, UIUC is ranked 4th in graduate education in Computer Engineering and 3rd in Environmental Engineering, and is one of the top 15 universities with the most Nobel prize winners in the world.

VinUni is an innovative and transformative university, with a talented community of faculty and students. As a member of the Vingroup ecosystem, with strong connections to the Vinmec healthcare system, VinBiocare, VinAI, VinBigdata, VinBrain, etc…, VinUni offers advantages in research, testing, and production environments. In particular, VinUni is able to implement interdisciplinary research projects that combine digital technology and precision medicine according to the 4Ps model (Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory).

“Biotechnology and data science are the two central fields of this century. We want to focus on developing innovative healthcare solutions that can be used to serve millions of people globally,” shared Professor Minh Do, Director of VISHC and Honorary Vice Provost of VinUniversity, at the Opening Ceremony.

“VinUni is engaging with brilliant and enthusiastic young people who want to make a positive impact on the world through the things they can do in their career as engineers. VinUni students have excellent training in electrical and computer engineering and computer science that enable them to become excellent researchers, and the faculty at VinUni are excellent scientists. My working together on multidisciplinary “team science” grand challenges in health care, we can accomplish so much more than any of us could do alone.” said Professor Brian Cunningham, Director of the Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at UIUC. Professor Cunningham will lead the project on Point of Care and Telehealth Diagnostics for Data-Driven Smart Health Systems at VISHC. After the VISHC Opening Ceremony, VinUni and UIUC have co-organized a series of workshops on smart health, with over 200 scholars and researchers participating in discussions on topics such as: Wastewater-Based Epidemiology for Pathogen and Microbial Genomic Surveillance; Nano Biosensors Examples and Future of Diagnostics; Building decentralized machine learning platforms…

With the aim of promoting innovation and outstanding research, VinUni plans to collaborate with leading scientists and renowned universities across the world to establish Research Centers that focus on smart health, smart mobility, green transformation, and digital transformation. The VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center is the first research center established according to this model.