Home > News > Berkeley researchers receive ARPA-H awardTeam will receive up to $19.3M in funding to transform lifesaving medical interventions with autonomous robotic surgeriesA team of researchers from UC Berkeley, UCSF and UC Davis has received a major award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to fund pioneering research into novel lifesaving medical interventions. Their project, an autonomous microbot capable of performing delicate surgeries inside the head, will receive up to $19.3 million from ARPA-H, a federal funding agency that supports transformative biomedical and health breakthroughs.
This award is from the agency’s Autonomous Interventions and Robotics (AIR) program, led by Dr. Ileana Hancu, a program manager at ARPA-H. AIR seeks to expand nationwide access to specialized and time-sensitive procedures by developing autonomous robots to deliver less invasive, more affordable surgical care anywhere in the United States.
Ronald Fearing, professor emeritus and Professor in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley; Ali Javey, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley; and neurosurgeon Ezequiel Goldschmidt from the Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute will serve as co-principal investigators on the five-year project dubbed FLEX-AIR, short for flexible, low-force, endonasal autonomous intervention robot.
