Technology and Innovation
As the real-world challenges our students and faculty tackle grow increasingly complex, we strive to provide modern, specialized environments to produce transformative research. With our focus on technology and innovation, we must continuously advance our facilities and infrastructure as we move into UVA’s Third Century.
A recent capital initiative, the Link Lab, allowed us the opportunity to create a world-class center of excellence in cyber-physical systems, based on UVA’s pioneering work in the emerging field. The Link Lab brings together more than two dozen diverse faculty members from multiple departments, and builds upon existing strengths in autonomous systems, smart cities and smart health. The lab hosts a unique, collaborative cohort of researchers and students dedicated to solving the most critical problems at the intersection of the cyber and physical worlds. It is committed to cross-cutting research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to make fundamental contributions to technology and engineering that are grounded in and applied to real-world.
Other innovations include the Center for Engineering in Medicine to create the nation’s best ecosystem for generating, developing and translating ideas at the engineering-medicine interface to improve prevention, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of disease. UVA has critical strategic advantages in this area, including an established culture of interdisciplinary collaboration and a status as one of a very few universities in the country with schools of engineering, medicine and nursing within a mile of each other. Many of the most innovative, high-impact approaches to complex medical problems facing our society are now emerging at the interface between engineering and health. By bringing creative minds together from across these professions, we can create new therapies, precision medicines and innovative medical devices.
Continued investments in capital projects will allow us to create more spaces that increase pan-University collaboration, expand research capabilities, support programs for diverse leadership initiatives and lead to innovative areas of coursework.