New technologies for improved surgical tools or systems that speed access to time-sensitive pathology reports may well come from undergraduates working side by side with physicians in teaching labs and operating rooms.

Such novel ideas spring from a program piloted in 2013 – and expanded this year – in which Rutgers biomedical engineering students gain real-world perspective by interacting with Robert Wood Johnson Medical School faculty and teaching-hospital physicians.

The students, all fourth-year undergraduates, observe how physicians work and digest their wish lists for tools that could improve their operating room effectiveness. The students then apply that knowledge to their senior design projects, developing technologies that meet practical needs. The aim: to benefit medicine and health care and, most notably, make surgery safer and more efficient.