The Ware Foundation Laboratory will be a core research facility established at the Miami Children’s Hospital and will be used by both the FIU faculty and students and MCH researchers. The Laboratory will contain highly specialized equipment that will utilize sophisticated sensory modalities for brain activity recording, analysis and diagnosis that are crucial to developing cutting edge clinical treatment approaches and new medical technology.

The Ware Foundation Endowment will give the College of Engineering the ability to attract exceptionally talented new researchers into the FIU-MCH joint program. These individuals will have the opportunity to conduct cutting edge research in an innovative multi-disciplinary environment that will allow them to make significant contributions as well as attract additional research funding. The Ware Foundation’s generous philanthropic support will produce a lasting legacy of medical breakthroughs benefiting children and their families today and for generations to come.

Our vision is to establish a multidisciplinary research platform for our researchers and scientists to develop their creative thinking in the information processing field (image, signal, and very large databases) with practical implications to neuroscience in a multidimensional world, integrating spatial and time coordinates with the different sensory modalities that are brought in synergy.

In the merging of these technologies, we see a productive ground for the development of new methodologies and scientific discovery that will meet the impending needs in neuroscience as we elicit both the functional mapping of the brain, and the causality of key brain disorders. A host of diverse technologies have evolved and “information processing” is now viewed broadly to encompass a spectrum of structural and functional information defining characteristics of clinical systems at different levels, generating scientific findings through new theoretical methods and effective hardware/software integration and implementation. It is also true that knowledge in one field can answer persistent questions in another. With this shared sentiment, we believe that neuroscience and information processing are inextricably linked. Enhanced knowledge in the first field will undoubtedly yield new theoretical developments, which in turn will come in support of system design with augmented viability in the second field.

The interplay between science and engineering is hence at its best by bringing information processing to the practical realm of neuroscience. Experimental results, as observed through clinical means or through system design evaluations, can serve to redefine or re-evaluate our theoretical assumptions and premises; just as learning more about the workings of the human brain will serve to generate new theories that can expand our potential for scientific/engineering discovery. It is exactly these beliefs that are the driving force of this research and which have allowed this research to thrive in the last decade, as we strive to take new leaps over the next five.