Innovating Cutting-Edge Robotics through Collaboration

A UMass Amherst research team led by faculty from the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation has been awarded nearly $3 million to establish the nation’s first graduate training program designed to combine nursing’s hands-on patient care with engineering’s technical knowledge.

Holly Yanco joins as a Distinguished Professor in the MIE department with a joint appointment in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences. She was previously a Distinguished University Professor in the Richard A. Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences at UMass Lowell, where she directed the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center. For over 25 years, she has assembled and led a wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations to solve open problems in robotics and AI, including the NSF-funded AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and

An innovative collaboration between engineering and nursing at UMass Amherst allows a PhD candidate to draw upon the expertise of nurses to improve robotic medical devices.