Education and University Partners
CBC works across USC, bringing the center’s research into teaching and drawing on expertise from engineering, business, design, and medicine. Three of those partnerships are ones we are especially proud of, and they come first.
USC Distinguished Leaders Program
Hosting the USC Distinguished Leaders
The USC Distinguished Leaders Program was a six-month program for experienced professionals who wanted to apply their careers to new work, projects, and societal problems. CBC sponsored the first cohort.
In January 2025 those leaders spent two days with us at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. They toured the institute, saw demonstrations from the Mixed Reality and Medical Virtual Reality labs, and worked through three questions with our researchers: what digital health and human performance look like when care shifts from treating illness to sustaining health, what the military needs from health and performance technology next, and how digital health is built as a business.
Dr. Leslie Saxon, CBC’s founder and executive director, meets with participants on how to use AI and other emerging technology to reach their goals.
USC Master of Business for Veterans
The capstone was about us
Each spring, students in the USC Marshall School of Business Master of Business for Veterans program complete a Strategy Capstone Project with an organization. In Spring 2025 that organization was CBC.
Matt Bartels, CBC’s military advisor, a retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel and a graduate of the program, brought the opportunity to CBC and supported the students and program leaders throughout. We gave the class our Department of War funded research data and working concepts, and posed a live problem we are working now: how to move our findings toward programs of record for the units whose Service Members stand to benefit. The semester produced eight team presentations and eight independent transition strategies for the center’s research.
Veteran students worked on federally funded science rather than a case study, and we got eight fresh views on a problem we are still solving.
Clinical studies with Keck Medicine
Lightning in the clinic
The platform we built for Service Members works in clinical care too. CBC conducts funded investigator studies with the Keck School of Medicine of USC, operates its Digital Studies Unit, and has run three studies that apply our Lightning software and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) to clinical questions.
Surgeon readiness, with Dr. Graeme Rosenberg. Surgeons work long operative days under sustained cognitive load, and like Service Members they have no good way to know when their own performance has degraded. With Dr. Rosenberg, we used Lightning and CGMs to study surgeon readiness.
Liver disease, with Dr. Norah Terrault. In a pilot study of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), Lightning and CGMs were used together with patients. Apple sponsored the study in kind.
Glucose and social determinants of health. With Keck Medicine, we studied CGM readings from people with diabetes in the Keck system alongside social determinants of health data. Abbott sponsored the study.
Our other teaching and research partnerships
Undergraduate courses
With the USC Iovine and Young Academy, CBC launched two undergraduate courses: Body Computing, and Healthcare Cybersecurity.
Sensor development
With the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, CBC supported development of the CardioGluco sensor.
Sustainability and health initiatives
With USC Dornsife Public Exchange, CBC co-funds work spanning sustainability and Olympic health.
Recognition and intellectual property