Winter/Spring 2008

COVER STORY Convergence of Bioscience & Engineering Public and Private Coulter's Legacy Three Nanomedicine Centers Bioscience & Engineering – In Brief

EVEN BEFORE the joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University was created in 1997, the two institutions collaborated on biomedical research. The Emory-Georgia Tech Biomedical Technology Research Center, which established a seed grant program to stimulate research between the medical school at Emory and researchers at Georgia Tech, began cultivating cross-town partnerships in 1987.

photo by Nicole Cappello Larry McIntire joined Georgia Tech as the chair of the Coulter Department in July 2003, after founding department chair Don Giddens became dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering. (300-dpi JPEG version - 769KB

But this $400,000-per-year seed grant program wasn’t enough for former Georgia Tech provost Michael Thomas and former executive vice president for health affairs at Emory University Michael Johns. They wanted more collaboration.

“When I joined Emory in 1996, I was surprised that Emory didn’t have a biomedical engineering department,” recalls Johns, who now serves as chancellor of Emory University. “When I realized Georgia Tech didn’t have one either, I thought it would be the perfect marriage of the faculty in the engineering school at Georgia Tech and the medical faculty at Emory.”

To discuss the possibility of a joint biomedical engineering department, Johns and Emory Dean of Medicine Thomas Lawley met with Thomas and Robert Nerem, a mechanical engineering professor at Georgia Tech and director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, a research institute whose mission is to integrate engineering, information technology and the life sciences in biomedical research.

They formed an advisory committee of Georgia Tech and Emory faculty to develop a set of recommendations for an innovative and unique joint department of biomedical engineering. Leading the committee was Don Giddens, an aerospace engineering professor at Georgia Tech from 1968-1992 who returned from being dean of engineering at Johns Hopkins University to chair the new biomedical engineering department.

“Getting Don to return was absolutely key to the success of the department,” says Thomas. “You can’t have success without quality leadership and Don created an environment of trust, discovery, innovation and enthusiasm with his vision for the department.”

In 2000, The Whitaker Foundation awarded the biomedical engineering department a $16 million leadership-development award. Six million dollars of the grant was used to further develop the undergraduate and graduate programs, hire new faculty and support graduate student fellowships. The other $10 million helped construct the four-story, nearly 100,000-square-foot U.A. Whitaker Building at Georgia Tech, where most of the biomedical engineering faculty offices, laboratories and classrooms are located.

In 2001, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation awarded a $25 million grant to the department. In recognition of this grant, the combined department is now known as the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Included within this grant were operating funds to purchase laboratory equipment and fund endowed chairs, and an $8 million endowment (which now totals $10 million) to provide ongoing funding for translational research.

After Giddens became dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering in July 2002, Larry McIntire joined Georgia Tech as the new department chair. Under his leadership, the Coulter Department garnered almost $17 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2007.

The department has grown to include 45 primary faculty members, 175 graduate students and more than 800 undergraduate students. In the “America’s Best Colleges 2008” edition of U. S. News & World Report, the undergraduate program ranked third and the doctoral program ranked second in the biomedical engineering specialty category.