Vol.25, No. 05	Oct. 1, 1999

Biomedical Engineering Center Gains Research Momentum With $3 Million From Whitaker Foundation

Columbia University has been awarded a $3 million grant over three years from the Whitaker Foundation of Rosslyn, VA., to strengthen its programs in biomedical engineering, a field its proponents call crucial to any large, multidisciplinary research university.

The Whitaker funding, along with matching funds from Columbia, will allow the Center for Biomedical Engineering in the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science to hire four new tenure-track faculty, build a new student laboratory and renovate lab space on the third floor of Engineering Terrace. Some of the University matching funds will come from Z.Y. Fu's naming gift of $26 million in 1997, which specified that priority in hiring new engineering faculty should go to biomedical engineering, along with computer science, applied mathematics and electrical engineering.

"This funding helps us to create important multidisciplinary links between engineering and health sciences, and takes us a step closer to creating a new department," said Van C. Mow, director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Stanley Dicker Professor of Biomedical Engineering, a named professorship created in 1998. "Engineers are bringing a new understanding to the workings of the human body, and we expect to become a major resource for research and teaching in this field."

Among those links will be several new courses team taught by faculty from Columbia's College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Fu Foundation School, including cellular physiology, biomedical imaging and radiology. Faculty from the two schools are already teaming up to conduct research.

The Whitaker Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that seeks to develop biomedical engineering programs at universities around the country, reported the decision June 16. The award, called a Biomedical Engineering Development Award, is the second the Foundation has made to Columbia. A Special Opportunity Award of nearly $1 million was announced in 1996.

Mow said he expected the University to establish a Department of Biomedical Engineering within the Fu Foundation School, and hoped that would occur by November 1. The proposal is currently before the University Senate, and would also have to be approved by Columbia's Board of Trustees. The most recent prior establishment of a new department at Columbia took place in 1994, when the Department of Medical Informatics was approved; the last new engineering department was the Department of Computer Science in 1979.

Columbia has awarded graduate and undergraduate degrees in biomedical engineering since 1962, relying on bioengineering facilities on the Morningside campus and on orthopedics and bioimaging facilities at the Health Sciences campus. The discipline received a boost in 1994, when President George Rupp established a Biomedical Engineering Steering Committee, including deans, department chairs and faculty from the College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Fu Foundation School, to chart new directions for the program. That committee recommended that the University establish a permanent Department of Biomedical Engineering.

To achieve that goal, the committee created a Center for Biomedical Engineering to oversee existing degree programs and appointed Mow as its head. With Edward F. Leonard, professor of chemical engineering and director of the Artificial Organs Research Laboratory, and Gerard A. Ateshian, professor of mechanical engineering, Mow successfully applied for the first Whitaker grant, which permitted the Center to hire three tenure-track faculty. Student enrollments have risen dramatically as Columbia has built the program, from an average of about five graduates annually through 1995 to an expected graduating class of 42 in 2001. Graduate enrollment has risen as well.

The Center has focused on three areas for research and teaching: biomedical imaging, cellular engineering and biomechanics.

Mow's own facility, the Orthopedic Biomechanics Laboratory, is now one of the largest National Institutes of Health-funded musculoskeletal and orthopedic research programs in the United States. Mow and his team are examining the detailed structure of knees and other joints, and have used data from patient MRIs to create computer models of the knee that show surgeons how a given procedure will affect movement of the joint. Mow has established a collaboration with J. Richard Steadman, the chief surgeon for the United States Olympic ski team, to create a telemedicine system that would make the computer models available to surgeons anywhere in the world.