What is CREATE-BEST?
CREATE-BEST is a graduate student training program funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada under the Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program. BEST is short for Biomedical Engineering Smartphone Training.
What is the CREATE-BEST program?
CREATE-BEST provides professional training and practical employment-ready skills to engineering students and researchers to meet the needs of the growing mHealth marketplace and to enable innovation.
What is mHealth?
mHealth is the practice of clinical healthcare and public health supported by mobile devices. This includes mobile device applications for collecting community and clinical health data; healthcare information delivery to practitioners, researchers, and patients; real-time patient monitoring; and direct provision of care via mobile technology.
What are the objectives of this program?
CREATE-BEST aims to:
- Provide participants with the skills needed to conceive, design, and build mHealth smartphone apps.
- Train participants to design and implement an evaluation protocol for apps.
- Entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship training so that participants can identify a commercialization pathway to bring a mHealth app to the appropriate market.
- Develop skills to permit communication with various multi-disciplinary audiences necessary to identify patient and clinical needs, obtain ethics approvals, end-user support, financial backing, etc.
- Provide participants with an awareness of the regulatory environment for mHealth applications.
What is the eligibility criteria for participation in the program?
Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as post-doctoral fellows who are conducting research under the direct supervision of one (or more) of the CREATE-BEST team members are eligible for full participation in this program.
Students enrolled in partner institutions and labs but not supervised by CREATE-BEST members may be eligible to participate in limited activities and events.
What organizations are involved in this program?
Involved organizations are:
- University of Ottawa (Ottawa, ON),
- Carleton University (Ottawa, ON),
- McGill University (Montreal, QC),
- and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (Ottawa, ON).
What is the CREATE-BEST timeline?
The program is planned to run for 6 years, starting 2016. CREATE-BEST student program is divided into six 1-year sessions.
What is the training duration?
Participants can be involved in the program for the duration of their studies, while the program is active.
How many students are admitted to the program each year?
Between 13 and 23 graduate students will be admitted and funded by CREATE-BEST each year. However, many program activities are open for others to participate, as long as there is space.
Who can participate?
We are targeting masters, PhD, and Post-Doctoral Fellows in Engineering, Computer Science, Science, or health related disciplines. Some undergraduate students may participate in various activities.
I’m a student/post-doc and I would like to participate. What do I need to do?
You can sign up here to receive email updates about events we host or co-host throughout the year. You can also check our events page to know about current activities.
However, some activities are exclusively held for students supervised by CREATE-BEST team members. If you are supervised by one of them, you will need to ask your supervisor to contact us about adding you to CREATE-BEST.
I’m a university professor and I would like to involve one of my students in this program. What do I need to do?
Please contact the program’s principle director, Dr. Natalie Baddour nbaddour@uottawa.ca
Alternatively, if you would only like to receive email updates on our public events, sign up here.
When should I apply?
The program typically starts with the beginning of the school-year in September. However, you can request to join-in at anytime.
Is there a deadline for applying?
There is no deadline as long as the program is still running. Specific activities will have specific deadlines for registration. Each event registration deadline will be announced on the event’s webpage.
Do I need to stay enrolled in my current studies to participate?
You need to be a university graduate student or post-doctoral fellow in engineering, computer science, science, or a health related discipline to participate in this program.