Innovation in Healthcare, Environment and Aviation at Rowan University

Steve Adubato goes one-on-one with Ali A. Houshmand, PhD, President of Rowan University, about the advancements and innovations happening in the fields of healthcare, the environment and aviation at Rowan’s VR Center.

1/11/18 #2101

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato, coming to you from Rowan University, and in fact, more specifically, we are in a center called the Virtual Reality Center at Rowan University, and we'll be doing a series of in-depth interviews with a whole range of people who are making a difference in applied research, and we start off our series with Doctor Ali A. Houshmand, who is the President of Rowan University. Good to see you Mr. President. Good to see you as well. Glad to be here, thank you. Well, we also want to make it clear that we have a group of students here at Rowan who are learning about broadcasting interviewing skills, it's an applied teaching class as well that I happen to be teaching here at Rowan at the time to fully disclose... applied research, what does it mean? And connect it to this center. Well, it means that this center is available to all the entities within our community, not only our faculty and the students, but also the businesses, the enterprises, the communities like the municipalities, like the hospitals, like doctors across the river, people who want to do the kind of experimentation that is intrusive so to speak. And let's assume that you want to cut some of these open? Yes. In order to kind of try some new methods, you cannot do that. You can't afford to just cut somebody just to see whether things work or... But if you have virtual reality? But if you have virtual reality, you can do that in a hundred different times, and eventually find the kind of solution that you think applies, and then take it to the real world and implement it. You know, you take that example and apply it to every aspect that you want, whether it's controlling floods, whether it's controlling population, whether it's designing a new traffic system, whether it's flying new aircrafts, and hard landing and takeoffs... Safe... excuse me for interrupting, to be safer in our very crowded airways? Exactly. You know, why is that the role of a public university? Well, with public university it belongs to the public, and that we are here to create knowledge and to impart knowledge, so when we create knowledge, the knowledge, in my view, belongs to our community and to our society, and we need to give it to them in a way that they can use it to make the lives of people better, that's really what universities are all about in my view. You know, this is the Virtual Reality Center here at Rowan, and what's interesting is that when we were getting ready, Doctor Houshmand, for today, one of the things that struck me..."