VinUniversity in Vietnam and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the US have announced the opening of the VinUni-Illinois Smart Health Center (VISHC), which will focus on interdisciplinary research in biotechnology and data science.

VISHC was officially given $13,5 million in funding from Vingroup to develop affordable and accessible projects that can positively impact people’s health.

In the past 2 years, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps and deficits in many countries’ healthcare systems, including countries with the most advanced healthcare industries. Because of this, VinUni and UIUC have officially established VISHC to develop affordable and widely accessible smart health technologies to increase the efficiency of healthcare systems and support early diagnostics and treatment for everyone, everywhere.

VISHC will be supporting projects in the following fields: (i) development of point-of-care devices; (ii) remote care and diagnostics; (iii) wastewater epidemiological surveillance; (iv) federated machine learning in precision medicine.

Each VISHC research project will be led by at least one professor from VinUni and one professor from UIUC. All VinUni students and fellows that participate in research at VISHC will have the opportunity to study and research at UIUC for 1 to 2 years. UIUC students will similarly be able to work for 1 to 2 years at VinUni. VISHC will train 50 Master’s students, 50 Ph.D. students, and 10 Postdoctoral Scholars at both VinUni and UIUC in key science and technology fields for smart healthcare.