Changing the Public’s View of Engineering
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University (BME) recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The program initially started as a $400,000 seed-grant initiative between Tech and Emory in 1987. In 1997, an advisory committee of both Tech and Emory began their work on establishing the new department. Don Giddens (now dean of the College of Engineering at Tech) returned to Georgia Tech (Giddens had previously served as chair of the Aerospace Engineering school) from Johns Hopkins in 1997 to chair the newly created department at Tech which is a partnership between the College of Engineering at Tech and the School of Medicine at Emory.
In 2000, the Whitaker Foundation awarded the biomedical engineering department a $16 million leadership-development award. Part of the grant ($6 million) was used to further development of the undergraduate and graduate programs, hire new faculty and support graduate student fellowships. The other $10 million helped construct the four story, 100,000 square foot U.A. Whitaker Building at Tech. In 2001, The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation awarded a $25 million grant. This grant provided for operating funds to purchase laboratory equipment and fund endowed chairs, and created an $8 million endowment to provide ongoing funding for translational research.
“The unique public/private relationship of the two universities benefited us with research opportunities and heightened visibility since it was so novel,” said Giddens. “It has worked so well because Emory doesn’t have an engineering school and Tech doesn’t have a medical school. It was a rare opportunity to develop the department from scratch.”
In its first 10 years of existence at Tech, the department has racked up a number of outstanding accomplishments. The Coulter Department is the only academic department in the United States to have three NIH centers focused on nanomedicine: the NIH Center Program of Excellence in Nanotechnology, the Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology, and the Nanomedicine Development Center. In U.S. News & World Report’s graduate rankings, the department ranks number two in the country and their undergraduate ranking was number three. Today BME has more than 40 faculty members housed at Georgia Tech and Emory. In addition, the department is already the second largest in the nation with almost 900 undergraduate students and 250 graduate students in biomedical engineering and bioengineering.
BME’s mission is to combine the design and problem solving skills of engineering with the medical and biological sciences to improve patient health care and the quality of life for healthy individuals. Focused research areas include cardiovascular disease, imaging, nerve injuries, neurological disorders, bone loss and cancer. The department received more than $27 million in sponsored projects from a variety of sources during FY 2006. In 2007, the department received almost $17 million alone from the National Institutes of Health.
BME collaborates not only with Emory University but Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Oregon Health Sciences Center, as well as being involved with research work funded by the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. Moving beyond the campuses of Georgia Tech and Emory, BME now has a seed grant program with Peking University in order to encourage investigators to collaborate across the globe. Grants, funded by The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, allow six Atlanta based faculty members to collaborate on research projects with PKU faculty members during the year. The two biomedical engineering departments are also developing a curriculum for a joint Ph.D. program.
BME is poised to reach globally with leading universities to succeed in the 21st century. “With BME, we are educating the next generation of researchers who will develop biomedical applications that have the potential to transform health care and serve humanity,” said Giddens.