Suspended in a pediatric therapy harness, the boy’s feet moved across the treadmill. Each foot strike represented new hope for kids living with neurological conditions – to regain motor function, improve trunk control and even take steps on their own.������

That technology, invented by UofL researchers, is helping patients thanks to UofL’s unique suite of programs aimed at moving biomedical research from lab to market as products that can save and improve lives. Now, via a new partnership called the MidSouth Hub, UofL is offering its expertise to researchers across the four-state region of Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee.����

“Seeing how the technology we’d worked so hard to support could impact that boy’s life was one of the proudest moments of my career,” said Jessica Sharon, senior director of innovation programs and new ventures at UofL. “That’s when I knew we were building something special here at UofL. With the MidSouth Hub, we can expand that impact and ensure even more potentially life-changing technologies make it out of universities and help patients.”��

PROOF OF CONCEPT��

UofL’s focus on innovation begins with the belief that good ideas shouldn’t stay in the lab — they belong out in the world, where they can make a positive impact as new diagnostics, treatments and therapeutics. To that end, the university has spent the past decade aggressively growing its support for biomedical innovation, helping researchers develop, test and refine their ideas before launch.��

UofL secured its first biomedical product innovation grant, the Wallace H. Coulter Translational Partnership, in 2011. Building on that success, UofL landed two more programs a few years later: Kentucky’s first NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) site and NIH Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub (REACH), led by now retired professor, Paula Bates.����

Those were quickly followed by another award, then another, then another, and today, UofL holds a robust suite of programs unique from its peers across the country.�� With each new round of funding UofL forged�� new partnerships that expanded the impact first across the Commonwealth, and now, to the four-state region. The result is the MidSouth Hub, a multi-institution partnership led by Vanderbilt University, with UofL providing its original programming and leading efforts in Kentucky.��

“UofL has developed strategies that can help anyone to create healthcare solutions, whether you are a professor at a large university or a student at a technical college,” said Matt McMahon, Director of the NIH’s SEED (Small business ����ֱ�� and Entrepreneurial Development) Office, which supports REACH. UofL is the only university to succeed in all three rounds of REACH funding.��

“And in the end,” he said, “it’s patients and communities that benefit. We’re very excited to see UofL offer their leadership and expertise in scaling their approach across a broader part of the country.”��

That approach is key to developing technologies like the pediatric therapy harness, which provides partial body weight support as therapists help the kids move their feet over the treadmill. The idea is to slowly and safely turn on muscles and gain control. Designed by researchers Andrea Behrman and Tommy Roussel, that technology has since been licensed and units are in-place or on their way to facilities in Pennsylvania, Texas and New York, as well as Kentucky.��

“I don’t know a university that supports faculty more for innovation and biomedical design than UofL,” said Behrman, a professor of neurological surgery and director of the Kosair for Kids Center for Pediatric NeuroRecovery. “It’s a massive help in moving good ideas down the path, and getting them out where they can actually help patients.”��

THE RIGHT STUFF��

When it comes to good ideas, UofL has plenty to choose from. A Carnegie Research-1 university with a robust academic medical center and affiliated health system, UofL’s clinicians and researchers work to discover, invent, test and implement cutting-edge medical innovations that ultimately are commercialized.����

“This kind of direct impact just isn’t possible without those ingredients,” said Jon Klein, UofL’s interim executive vice president of research and innovation and vice dean for research at its School of Medicine. “That intersection of medicine, research and our suite of innovation programs — that mix is driving positive patient outcomes here and beyond.”��

Those positive outcomes cover a range of potentially devastating diagnoses. Take the�� cancer-fighting technology invented by researchers Geoffrey Clark, Joe Burlison and John Trent, which works by targeting the RAS protein. When mutated, RAS turns into a stuck accelerator pedal, with cells suddenly growing very fast and penetrating other tissue, just like a tumor cell.������

Stopping that process has long been considered a ‘holy grail’ that could shut down at least a third of human tumors. Thanks in part to support from UofL’s innovation programs, that technology is now in development with Qualigen Therapeutics, Inc., a publicly traded California-based biomedical company, and moving down the long pathway to FDA approval.����

“UofL is in a unique position to develop technologies like this because you not only have actual clinicians and cutting-edge research, but programs to assist industry partners to drive the resulting innovations to market,” said Michael Poirier, the company’s Chairman and CEO. “We look forward to continuing work with UofL and to advancing these important clinical technologies with the goal of developing an effective treatment for this unmet need.”��

READY TO LAUNCH��

Over the past decade, UofL’s I-Corps and REACH programs have supported hundreds of innovators, dozens of new products and licensing agreements, millions in follow-on funding and the launch of at least 16 new companies.��

One of those companies is led by School of Medicine researcher Matthew Neal, who participated in UofL’s Economic Development Administration-backed PRePARE program for developing pandemic-related technologies, along with the I-Corps site before going on to the prestigious national NSF program to develop his VR technology for patients with hearing deficiencies.��

Neal’s technology aims to help patients program their hearing aids and test out different models in realistic virtual environments, such as a noisy restaurant, all without leaving the comfort of the clinical setting.��

That led to a startup, Immersive Hearing Technologies, which Neal co-founded with former university entrepreneur-in-residence, Jeff Cummins. Together, they’ve already secured non-dilutive follow-on funding and are on their way to improving the clinical processes behind a widespread problem – hearing loss – affecting one in eight Americans over the age of 12.����

“The innovation programs were invaluable in understanding who our customers are, what they needed and how we might get this technology to market,” Neal said. “It’s no good if an idea like this just sits on a shelf. This is a technology that can help people, and it needs to be out in the world to do that.”����

And that’s the goal, Sharon said.����

“We don’t want good ideas to stay on our campus or any campus,” Sharon said. “With these programs, we’re going to keep growing, keep pushing, to move these innovations from lab to market. And with this new MidSouth Hub, I know we can do that on an even bigger scale.”��

Through community-engaged research, the city becomes a sort of ‘living, urban lab,’ allowing researchers to collaborate with their neighbors on important issues such as health, economic development, education and more.����

It’s a special focus for UofL, one of only 84 universities nationwide to hold both the top-tier Research 1 and Community Engaged designations through the Carnegie Classifi cation of Institutions of Higher ����ֱ��. The goal is to improve the quality of research by talking to people who know the problem best — because they live it — to create mutual benefit and positive impact.

“We have to work together to create that road map, agree on the kinds of questions that we’re trying to answer and have a shared understanding of the challenges,” said Ted Smith, associate professor in the School of Medicine and director of the UofL Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil within UofL’s Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute. “We’ve had projects where everybody could be involved in the science and I think Louisville is particularly good at this; we’re curious people and there is a service mentality.”��

Smith is one of many at UofL conducting community-engaged research. All across campus, researchers are partnering with the community to make discoveries about the environment, equity, aging, workforce development and more.��Douglas Craddock, Jr., UofL’s vice president for community engagement, said that while community-engaged research has direct tangible benefit here, what we learn from it can have a positive impact far beyond.��

“It’s important that the community is involved in the research,” said Craddock, whose office works broadly with local organizations to build and sustain community relationships and trust. “Not just simply involved, but impacted by the research in the way that changes lives for years to come.”��

Here are just a few ways UofL researchers are making meaningful impact by working with the community.��

PLANTING A SEED��

They say you should stop and smell the roses. But what if you look around your��neighborhood, and there are no roses … or any plants at all?����

Scientists can make educated guesses about what kind of impact a neighborhood’s greenness — or lack thereof — might have on the people living there, including on physical, mental and emotional health. But to really know, you have to go meet your neighbors, roll up your sleeves and get your hands a little dirty. So, that’s exactly what UofL researchers did.��

In an effort known as Project Green Heart, the UofL Envirome Institute led the planting of thousands of trees and shrubs across South Louisville as part of a first-of-its-kind interventional study on how greenness effects health outcomes. Neighbors picked up shovels, filled out surveys and worked with the researchers to study and improve their community.����

“It was great to see the trees planted in my neighborhood,” said Toni Smith, who lives in an area covered by Project Green Heart. “Not only did they provide screens from pollution, they offered privacy and helped to beautify our homes. As a participant in the study from the beginning, I am excited about the research on our neighborhood air pollution.�Ũ�į��

As the first large-scale interventional clinical trial of this kind, this study will have significant value as cities around the world seek to mitigate the health risks from a changing climate though green infrastructure. The results could also reveal new public health approaches to improving heart, psychological and other health outcomes.  ����

Working with the community can take some of the guesswork out of research and ensure it has real-world impact, said Luz Huntington Moskos, director of the community-engagement core in the Envirome Institute’s Center for Integrative Environmental Health Sciences. As a result, community engagement is required by many of the National Institute of Health’s largest grant programs, including ones supporting projects through Envirome.��

“We, as scientists, can have very educated guesses about what’s happening,” she said, “but really understanding how people are impacted in their daily lives and the priorities of the community members is very important.”��

GETTING TO WORK��

We rely on technology for everything these days — to keep us connected, to find our way and even to make our morning cup of coffee. But technology has also had a deep and lasting impact on the way we work, with many jobs now requiring an entirely new skillset than even just a decade ago.��

“How do you — as a member of the workforce, an employer or a student — prepare for these changes?” said Jeff Sun, a professor and dean of research in the UofL College of ����ֱ�� and Human Development. “That’s the question for a number of industries.”��

Sun and UofL teammates Annika Bennett and D’Neika Lopez are working to better understand these changes through their U.S. Department of Labor-funded Modern Apprenticeship Pathways to Success (MAPS) program. They’ve also enlisted community partners, including ���dzܾ�������������’s newly created WestEnd Apprenticeship Collaborative, the Kentucky Primary Care Association and eastern Ky.-based Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation (MCHC). ��

The idea is to study this evolving ‘future of work’ in different settings and industries, each with its own unique workforce needs. In health care, for example, the providers of tomorrow are expected to work with new tools like AI-driven diagnostics and electronic medical records systems. ��Teresa Dotson, director of financial affairs at MCHC, said the research done with UofL – and resulting training – has helped fill the system’s talent pipeline while preparing people for jobs they might not have otherwise had.

“This is my community, and I believe that life shouldn’t be a barrier to education or a career,” said Teresa Dotson, director of financial affairs at MCHC. “I can honestly say that this is my favorite project I’ve ever worked on in my career.”��

Ultimately, the researchers hope to create industry-specific training and apprenticeships that connect what students learn in class with their eventual careers. The apprenticeships will also give them field experience with disruptive, cutting-edge technologies that can change how work is done.��

Sun said preparing a future tech-ready workforce is especially important now. According to a 2019 report from the Brookings Institute, automation will be most disruptive in the Heartland, and especially in Kentucky and Indiana, with hundreds of thousands of jobs susceptible to automation. Meanwhile, new jobs will be created and others will evolve to require new tech skills.��

“It’s absolutely critical that we’re ready for the workforce needs of tomorrow,” he said. “By partnering with the employers and workers who see those needs in the real world, we can better predict and prepare for them.�Ũ�į��

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS��

Thump. Thump. Your heart is racing, and you feel a sharp pain pierce your chest. You need help, but can’t go to the hospital. You never applied for insurance — well, you tried, but the forms were confusing and in a language you don’t understand.����

“A lot of our first-generation immigrant neighbors, especially aging Asian immigrants, face barriers like this in accessing health care,” said Dee Antimisiaris, an associate professor in UofL’s School of Public Health and Information Sciences. “If you don’t know the culture, language and the complex U.S. health care system, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to navigate.”��

But you can’t really understand those difficulties unless you’ve experienced them. So, Antimisiaris and researchers from UofL’s Kent School of Social Work teamed up with ���dzܾ�������������’s Asia Institute Crane House, a non-profit organization working to expand understanding between the peoples of Asia and the U.S.����

Together, they held focus groups with health care providers, aging Asian American immigrants and their children, who often act as translators, navigators, social workers and advocates when their parents seek care. Kiran Kaur, a first–generation Punjabi, Sikh immigrant who participated in the study with her parents, said it felt empowering to work with researchers on problems that affect the people she cares about.��

“Working on an initiative that centered toward Asian health was able to give me an additional voice that helped share the seriousness of health to my Asian family, friends and community,” said Kaur, a pharmacy technician. “This type of work contributes to the foundation of creating a future for the Asian generations to come.”��

The problem is not only complex, but growing. According to the Pew Research Center, Asian American is the fastest-growing ethnic or racial group in the U.S., representing some 22 million people — 57 percent of which are first–generation immigrants. They come from more than 20 countries, each of which has its own culture, history, language and relationship with health and health care. That is, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.����

The researchers now are working to disseminate their findings and explore ways to best reach and support the diverse members of this community. Currently, backed by a Humana Foundation Community Partners Grant, they’re piloting a volunteer, peer-to-peer support program and partnering with UofL’s J.B. Speed School of Engineering to build a digital tool for immigrants struggling to navigate the U.S. health care system.��

“Community-engaged research is critical to helping us understand the unique and complex needs of this diverse community,” Antimisiaris said. “As communities grow and become more global, the way we do research and implement care and policy must modernize accordingly. Without community engaged research, we can only guess about how to meet population health needs.”��

Betty Coffman in the Office of Communications & Marketing contributed to this article.

Each day, Wilson and her classmates would hike a half-mile to the cave in Mira de Aire, Portugal, where they’d dig alongside UofL researchers and graduate students, tracking and recovering artifacts from the site. Wilson is one of many UofL students of all levels and disciplines who participate in research every year — a unique opportunity that allows them to gain hands-on experience and explore potential future careers as investigators.����

��“Archaeology is an especially hands-on field, so my experience helped me to visualize my future career and see if I was truly up for the job,” Wilson said. “I think I came back to campus with a much better understanding of what I wanted to do in the discipline and what I didn’t, which is so valuable for determining your next steps in life.”��

Led by anthropologist Jonathan Haws, the team worked to find and catalog animal bones, charcoal, stone tools and soil samples that could reveal where, when and how early humans lived. The annual digs, part of a three-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, have led to groundbreaking discoveries about the movement of early humans.����

For example, that modern humans arrived in the westernmost part of Europe about 5,000 years earlier than previously known, at a time when most believed there were only Neanderthals. Those findings led to important ramifications for understanding the possible interaction between the two human groups — and the ultimate disappearance of the latter.��

“That discovery completely changes the way we understand early human history, where they lived and when,” said Haws, a professor and chair of the UofL anthropology department. “Now, our team is working to paint a fuller picture of what that life looked like — how they cooked, how they hunted, how they lived. Being involved in something like that is just a huge opportunity for students.”��

The impact of technology on how we experience the��world creates both new possibilities and a host of��practical and ethical questions. But Tiffany Calvert, an��associate professor in UofL’s Hite Institute of Art + Design,��is looking for answers — and to find them, she’s going��straight to the source.

In her “Machine Vision Series,” Calvert partners with��her own virtual apprentice, a bot trained to paint as her��collaborator. Calvert believes working with AI can help us��understand its implications and explore the blurring line��between what we see and what’s real.

“I often get asked, ‘is AI your collaborator or your antagonist?’ ” said Calvert, one of many at UofL exploring the world through creativity. “The answer is that it’s complicated. I’m working with AI in a way that both criticizes its vulnerabilities and has a healthy appreciation of what it can do.”

ART DOTCOM��

Cutting her artistic teeth at the height of the ‘90s Dotcom bubble, Calvert has long been fascinated with the intersection of art and technology. Then, traditional forms of visual expression were converging with new digital tools for photo-editing and design.��

“There was something exciting about that convergence and the fact that I could use these tools to build something creative,” she said. In a way, Calvert saw technology as a medium similar to charcoals or paint. But as technology has advanced, now capable of its own analysis and decision-making, it’s become more of an artistic partner.����

For her “Machine Vision Series,” Calvert trained her AI collaborator by feeding it more than 1,000 historical still life paintings of tulips in bloom. It’s a technique known as machine learning, where a computer is shown examples to learn what something looks like — be it cars, crosswalks or frescos.����

After a while, the AI could recognize the tulips and begin to ‘paint’ its own. Calvert would paint, then the computer, then Calvert again, caking on thick, colorful globs of oil pigment to differentiate herself from the machine.����

The partnership might seem counterintuitive. Art, after all, is built on humanity and meaningful imperfection, but you’d expect a computer algorithm — something literally built on logic — to produce only the predictable and perfect.����

But when the AI painted, it wasn’t perfect. The algorithm can only interpret based on what it’s seen before, and sometimes, it misinterpreted or made logical leaps. Some AI-generated tulips were distorted in interesting and unpredictable ways like confusing the bulb of a flower with, say, an oyster or halved peach.������

“Those distortions behave like a mutating virus,” Calvert said. “It’s interesting, because while it’s incredible that the technology can generate beautiful imagery, those misinterpretations reveal the underlying humanity in the code, and the biases inherent in datasets.”��

THE HUMANITY��

While flowers that look like peaches might seem like a problem, for Calvert, it’s a good thing. Artists are much more interested problems than answers.����

“That’s where the interesting stuff happens,” she said. “These problems allow me to explore larger issues. How is this a metaphor for technology infecting our world and what precedents are out there?”��

AI can be a powerful tool, she said, but it’s only as good as its human creators and users — who aren’t always clear, make mistakes and sometimes behave irresponsibly, irrationally or maliciously.��

“The technology is obviously only as good as the information we give it, how we program it and how we use it,” she said. “That’s the underlying paradox, the humanity in the machine.”����

Take the technology that created the tulips in Calvert’s paintings. Those specific tulips are the result of creative farming — a plant virus that boomed during the 17th century Dutch Golden Age, creating an explosion of new and unique tulip colors and variants.��

That virus underpinned Tulip Mania, the first speculative bubble of the modern era, where the flowers were as much an investment and status symbol as decoration. Dutch consumers might have purchased a tulip bulb for more than the average salary.��

“When Tulip Mania happened, the technology got way out of control from both an economic perspective and a biological one, where it’s now a problem for farmers,” Calvert said. “So humans, in their hubris, didn’t understand the destruction they’ve created.”��

That’s why, Calvert said, it’s important to take a critical eye to technology and understand its implications. For example, with AI technology readily available and the content it creates surging across the internet, a recent Forbes survey shows some 75% of consumers worry AI will be used for misinformation.��

“It’s interesting to explore, because AI is both really critical to solving important problems and at the same time, it depends on who programs and uses it,” she said. “Painting has always adopted and responded to new technologies, as a ways of examining our perception of the world.”��