Body Engineering, Los Angeles (BE-LA) was GK-12 program at the University of Southern California (USC) that aimed to involve and prepare our best PhD students to become STEM leaders of tomorrow through a fellowship that incorporates extensive training and K-12 classroom experience. The program’s research theme was body engineering, and emphasizes the concept that the human body is a machine that can be studied, experimented upon, analyzed, and augmented. This theme provided an attractive and engaging vehicle for introducing STEM concepts and university research to the K-12 classroom and leverages the overall strength of the Viterbi School of Engineering, several university research initiatives at the interface between engineering and biology, physiology, and health, and a very large group of committed faculty. Research topics that will be translated to the classroom include: non-invasive sensing and imaging, speech articulation, hand articulation, neuromuscular control, cardiovascular mechanics, nutrition and metabolism, biological and bio-compatible materials, vision, object recognition, and human-machine interaction.
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Investigators: Krishna Nayak, Gisele Ragusa, Andrea Hodge and Maja Mataric, University of Southern California