Anniversary celebration

BME department marks first decade

Abby Vogel
Research News

	Grad students Peter Crapo and Christine Gumera in Assistant Professor Yadong Wang’s lab.

A picture of collaboration—from across disciplines to across town—the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University (BME) celebrates its 10th anniversary on April 23.

Combining the skills of engineering with medical and biological sciences, BME has worked to improve not only patient health care, but also the quality off life in healthy individuals. Some of the work research labs are undertaking includes gene prediction, cancer detection and prevention, cardiac regeneration, biomedical imaging, neuroengineering and molecular engineering. Utilizing magnetic resonance imaging and other computer modeling techniques, 20 labs and 46 faculty members work to tackle the health challenges of the 21st century.

As part of the burgeoning nanomedicine field, the Coulter Department is host to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers Program of Excellence in Nanotechnology, the Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology and the Nanomedine Development Center. The Coulter Department is the only academic department in the United States to have three NIH centers focused on nanomedicine. In U.S. News & World Report’s undergraduate and graduate rankings, the Coulter Department ranks No. 3 and No. 2, respectively.

Now dean of the College of Engineering, former School of Aerospace Engineering Chair Don Giddens returned to Georgia Tech in 1997 from The Johns Hopkins University in order to chair the fledgling department.

The department utilizes the strengths of the public/private relationship of the two universities, Giddens says. “[This partnership] benefited us with research opportunities and gave us a lot of visibility because it was so novel,” he said. “And it works well, because Emory doesn’t have an engineering school and Tech doesn’t have a medical school. And because of the [nature] of the two different schools, we aren’t getting our funding from the same sources.”

By 2001, a $16 million grant from the Whitaker Foundation and a $25 million grant from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation enabled the purchase of equipment, funded department chairs, explored and developed both graduate and undergraduate programs, and built the U.A. Whitaker Building at Tech, where most of the faculty offices, classrooms and labs are located.

“In September 1997, we had approval to hire 18 faculty members [for the department],” Giddens said. Instead of moving current professors already teaching in the bioengineering certificate program, Giddens said he saw an opportunity to expand, bringing in new faculty members. It was a “rare opportunity,” he said, to develop the course framework from scratch.

BME also showcases the uniqueness of its students. Undergraduates quickly become involved in research, as the degree is very research-oriented, Giddens said. “Most feel BME attracts students who want to have an impact on society, who want to apply engineering principles to health,” he said. And, as an engineering course of study, it bears the distinction of being nearly evenly divided between male and female students.

Larry McIntire, BME chair since 2002, says the department may have a few hurdles to vault, but that becoming ranked as the No. 1 biomedical engineering program is definitely the priority. In less than 10 years, the department already is the second largest nationally.

	Professor Lena Ting fits graduate student Stacie Chvatal with sensors that infrared cameras detect to study her movement and balance.

“The Coulter Department’s greatest successes over the last five years include the recruitment of approximately 20 outstanding new faculty to Tech and Emory, and the development of internationally recognized innovative research and education programs in biomedical engineering,” he said. “We have pioneered the use of problem-based learning in the biomedical engineering curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are widely recognized for our excellence in cardiovascular engineering and in tissue engineering/regenerative medicine. We have also been national leaders in developing a critical mass of research in new and emerging fields such as nanomedicine, systems biology, neuroengineering and biomaterials.”

Both Giddens and McIntire agree BME will be the No. 1–ranked biomedical engineering program. For Giddens, it just needs a little more time. “It will be very important for the Emory and Tech relationship to grow beyond what it is right now,” he said. Another key, Giddens says, is to continue recruiting extremely capable faculty members and providing adequate space for the growing department—a tenet echoed by McIntire.

“We hope the Coulter Department will continue to grow to approximately 50 faculty over the next 10 years,” McIntire said. “With our leadership in the field of nanomedicine, it would make sense that faculty in the Coulter Department would occupy significant space in the new nanotechnology building.”

Beginning at 8:30 a.m. in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building atrium, the day’s events include an introduction from Giddens and Thomas Lawley, dean of the Emory School of Medicine. Roderic Pettigrew, the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Engineering, is the keynote speaker. Other speakers throughout the day include Andrew Tsourkas, currently an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the first graduate of the Tech and Emory BME program.

The program initially started as a $400,000 seed-grant initiative between Tech and Emory in 1987 by former Tech Provost Michael Thomas and current Emory Chancellor Michael Johns. In 1997, the two established an advisory committee of both Tech and Emory faculty to establish a new department.

Researchers and professors hail from various campus disciplines—aerospace and mechanical engineering, computing and physics—and utilize several different spaces across campus, including four buildings with a combined 800,000 square feet on Tech’s campus and a research building on Emory’s campus.

“I came back to Atlanta specifically for [developing] BME,” Giddens said. “Of all the leadership roles I’ve held, the BME partnership is the one I’m proudest of.”

Robert Nesmith in Communications & Marketing contributed to this article.