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.
Multiple VIP teams at UArizona focus on health-related research:
- AI for Medical Interviewing
- Brain Communication Networks
- Characterizing the Microbiome of Shelter Animals
- Collaborative Anthropology of Reproduction and the Environment (CARE)
- Cultivating Equitable Food Policy in Southern Arizona
- DISCAPAZ: Disability Experiences in the Borderlands
- Healthy Harvesters
- Heat, Housing, and Health+: Understanding Vulnerability and Building Resilience within Manufactured Housing Communities (H3+)
- The Medical Sociology Shop
- Optical Imaging to Advance Health Care and Biomedicine
- Orthopaedic Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Laboratory
- Precision Aging Network Student Ambassadors
- Sleep and Circadian Research Group
- UA Holodeck: Health, Wellbeing, and Design Thinking
- Understanding Trauma Patient Health Literacy and Patient Discharge
- Understanding the Prevalence, Transmission, and the Epidemiological Traceback Investigation of Cyclospora cayatenensis in Fresh Produce Growing Regions
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.
To learn more about VIP, visit uavip.arizona.edu or follow @uazvip on Instagram.