By Erin Steinbrüchel Holt, BA'05

"The Innovation Catalyst Fund is a powerful accelerator that helps our faculty turn bold ideas into tangible impact," says Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs C. Cybele Raver. "From adaptive learning tools to lifesaving medical technologies, these projects exemplify how our commitment to innovation is shaping a better future. As these examples show so powerfully, at Vanderbilt, research is more than discovery-it's about solving real-world challenges and improving lives."

A Breath of Empowerment
Breast cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy often face a painful tradeoff. While treatment can save their lives, it can also increase the risk of heart disease, particularly for left-sided breast cancer. To reduce that risk, patients are taught to hold their breath during treatment to protect the heart-a process that can be stressful and hard to master.

Megan Salwei, an assistant professor of anesthesiology who specializes in designing technologies that align with how real people think, feel and behave, saw a chance to help. With catalyst funding, her team developed BReaTHS, a personalized system to give patients real-time feedback while they practice breath holds at home and during treatment. The system consists of a respiratory sensor belt that measures patient chest expansion and virtual reality goggles that provide real-time feedback about the quality of the breath. The system aims to reduce treatment anxiety while improving safety and outcomes.

Salwei says, "Our dream is that this tool not only improves treatment safety and reduces the long-term cardiac toxicities of treatment, but also helps patients feel more in control during a stressful and vulnerable time."

In the case of radiation therapy, Salwei believes this approach to patient training will improve the long-term cardiac health of the more than 300,000 breast cancer patients diagnosed in the U.S. each year.

Textbooks of the Future
Scott Crossley, an avid reader, has always been interested in how language influences thinking and learning. In studying how people read and process text, Crossley, professor of psychology and human development, noticed a gap: Not all students engage with reading in ways that help them understand and retain information. His team developed an "intelligent text framework" to make reading more interactive by prompting readers to ask questions and make predictions as they read.

With catalyst funding, Crossley conducted a rigorous study showing the framework's effectiveness, paving the way for commercialization. The vision? A future where textbooks that adapt to readers'
needs help struggling readers develop lifelong skills.

As Crossley puts it, this work is paving the way toward textbooks of the future, where "the texts are more interactive, allowing readers to ask questions and engage in meaningful dialogue with the text." Crossley's vision is that texts will be adaptive, truly personalizing the content to meet each reader's unique needs.

A Boost to Early Childhood Learning

Too many children enter kindergarten without the language and cognitive skills they need to thrive. Amy Booth, professor of psychology and human development, and her team created REED (read, engage, explore, discuss), an app that turns shared book reading into a powerful tool for building language and social-emotional skills. The app gives parents and caregivers real-time prompts to engage children in meaningful conversation during reading time to help boost the language and social emotional skills of their preschoolers.

Catalyst funding allowed Booth's team to develop a functional, user-friendly version of the app to test with families. The goal is to scale REED so it can adapt to individual children's needs and provide evaluative and tracking tools, so that users can see their progress as they read together.

"Children's early experiences matter a lot to building basic knowledge and skills that are essential for their success when they begin school," Booth says. "Our team is capitalizing on new technologies to build tools that all caregivers, regardless of background and circumstances, can use in supporting their children's early learning."

Medical Implants Revolution
For patients who need surgical implants, timing is everything. Traditional implants dissolve based on chemical timelines, not on the body's healing process, which leads to complications when implants last too long-or not long enough. Scott Guelcher, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has spent years working to change that.

With catalyst funding, Guelcher's team developed materials for revolutionary surgical mesh implants that flex and move with the body while dissolving at the pace of healing. This approach could transform care for patients with additional health challenges, like diabetes or poor circulation, ensuring that implants support recovery without creating new problems.

"We're making implants that stay as long as they're needed and go away when they're not, based on the body's healing, not just chemistry," Guelcher says. "We think the world is ready for the first implants that heal in biological time."