Biomedical engineering gets $3 million

Biomedical engineering students design and build medical devices.

$3 million award from the Whitaker Foundation is providing increased momentum for the University's rapidly growing program in biomedical engineering, which spans two schools of the University. The award, one of only six awarded to institutions across the country in the most recent competition, will be used to enhance student laboratories, hire new faculty, and provide general support for departmental activities.

"Our goal is to be recognized as one of the best biomedical engineering programs in the country, and this clearly will move us in that direction," says Richard Waugh, department chair. "With Rochester's distinctive attributes in hands-on research for its students, a strong engineering school, and a well-known medical program, we've already had a good head start."

"Biomedical engineering is emerging as the 'hot' engineering field of this century," says Kevin Parker, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "It's a natural fit with our older engineering departments and with the interests of medical school researchers and clinicians."

While the department was established in 2000, the University's work in biomedical engineering--the interaction between engineering and the biological sciences, such as designing artificial blood or sculpting a cornea--can be traced back decades.

In the early 1960s, Rochester was among the first recipients of National Institutes of Health grants to study fields that today are considered central to biomedical engineering.

The department now offers students the option of earning a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree in biomedical engineering and includes faculty from both the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

"Funding from the Whitaker Foundation is not easily won," Waugh says. "But they were impressed with the quality of the effort we've made so far and were impressed that we've recruited some great faculty in a very competitive field."

The Whitaker Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving human health through the support of biomedical engineering. Since its inception, the foundation's biomedical engineering research programs have awarded more than $575 million to colleges and universities for faculty research, graduate fellowships, and program development.

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