Vertically Integrated Projects
The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program is a transformative approach to higher education that engages undergraduate and graduate students in ambitious, long-term, large-scale, interdisciplinary project teams. The program has been rigorously evaluated and refined for more than two decades at more than 40 academic institutions across the globe.
Health Sciences Design (HSD) offered the University of Arizona’s inaugural VIP course in 2020, UA Holodeck: Health, Wellbeing, and Design Thinking, led by Win Burleson, PhD. With that course, HSD leveraged its own interdisciplinary nature to bring the VIP model to Wildcat Country. In later semesters, HSD introduced additional VIP teams, including AI for Medical Interviewing, led by Allan Hamilton, MD, FACS from the Arizona Simulation Technology & Education Center, and Optical Imaging to Advance Healthcare and Biomedicine, led by Travis Sawyer, PhD.
Through its involvement with VIP, Health Sciences Design seeks to build collaborations and synergies across campus that can advance the university’s mission of being an education innovator. At the same time, by working with colleagues from a diversity of disciplines, HSD seeks to bring more minds together to address grand challenges in the health sciences and health care.
Health Sciences Design has also been instrumental in establishing centralized program administration for VIP. In 2022, faculty and staff from HSD and the Arizona Institute for Resilience led successful efforts to secure strategic funds to develop administrative support, financial aid opportunities, faculty development and program assessment for VIP.
To learn more about VIP, visit uavip.arizona.edu or follow @uazvip on Instagram.