Your identical twin.

Friday, March 13, 2026

Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday! Happy St. Pat’s!

Imagine the moment when you meet your identical twin. Digital twin. Representing your physiological self. A carefully created model using data from sensors, medical images and wearable devices that will enable advanced analysis and parametric studies without you present. Think of the potential of revolutionizing health care and long-term wellness by predicting illness before it occurs. 

Clearly, many aspects such as data security, model accuracy, cost and ethical considerations must be addressed before such models can be reliably implemented and trusted. Exciting research, interdisciplinary intertwined research, is underway at the intersection of engineering, physical sciences, life sciences and medicine to make our digital twins a reality.

As I write this message today, on Thursday, a remarkable team of engineers, scientists and physicians has gathered here at S&T to discuss and continue to develop a roadmap for next-generation precision health. The NextGen Pathways 2026symposium began yesterday and is ongoing as this message is delivered. The vision? “To accelerate innovations in precision health that improve health outcomes for Missourians and the world.” The mission? “To revolutionize health care for our citizens, eliminate health care disparities, and transform community health through cross-disciplinary collaborations of world-class academic researchers in partnership with government agencies and industry leaders.”

Recognizing the importance of an engineering approach in delivering health care, multiple universities have established new engineering-based medical programs or created engineering-to-medicine pathways. The most recent announcement of joint engineering and medicine, Arizona State’s John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, highlights the importance of this growing trend. 

Here at S&T, we have created our escalator to medicine program that is designed to facilitate the engineering-to-medicine transition for many of our exceptional health care minded engineering students. To better support students pursuing this transition, we have established programs in biomedical engineering for undergraduate students, and bioengineering and biological sciences for graduate students. 

Technological and scientific advances such as TeraScale data, high performance computation, artificial intelligence and gene therapy have hugely accelerated the progress of medical engineering and bioinnovation. Precision health and predictive models to advance human health that are here today make predictions about what new developments could be expected. The fast pace progress, however, makes it difficult to predict what will happen next week, much less in the next 10 or 100 years. 

Nonetheless, we here at S&T remain curious and keep asking anyway. Our under-construction state-of-the-art Bioplex research and educational complex will attract talented faculty, scientists and students who will work collaboratively to address health care challenges by conducting research at the intersection of engineering, biology and medicine. To that end, we are searching to identify and onboard the Kummer Institute director for our Center for BioInnovation and Medical Engineering.

Our Bioplex is the launchpad for the new frontiers of “physicianeering,” a phrase that truly fits the idea for our early assured admittance program to medical school. It also represents a significant growth and diversification of our student body, ensures critical contributions to critical challenges facing health care, and highlights S&T’s motto: Solving for Tomorrow.

Warmly,

-Mo.

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Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu

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