Whitaker Foundation Awards Aim To Inspire Innovation

The Whitaker Foundation, headquartered in Washington D.C., has presented 14 Special Opportunity Awards in biomedical engineering to teams of investigators who have come up with proposals to establish novel training programs in the field. The awards range from $250,000 to $750,000. The foundation recognizes that the field of bioengineering is a meeting place for many different disciplines. Medical sciences such as physiology and pharmacology; engineering subjects like mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science; and other areas of study, such as molecular biology, materials science, and mathematics, all have a hand in shaping the field. Its influence is just as widespread, apparent in almost any facet of medicine, be it diagnosis (new imaging techniques that allow doctors to see inside the body without resorting to surgery), treatment (surgical lasers, artificial organs), or basic research (technologies like the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR; and molecular modeling of proteins). The Whitaker Foundation is one of the foremost supporters of bioengineering research in the United States, with existing grants to fund young investigators, graduate students, and institutional development (S. Veggeberg, The Scientist, March 30, 1992, page 21). Peter G. Katona, vice president of the foundation's biomedical engineering program, says that these new special opportunity awards were created to ". . . challenge the institutions to produce innovative and effective ways of enhancing the field of biomedical engineering." Two hundred seventy preliminary applications for the award were reviewed in-house, and 125 applicants were invited to submit full proposals. The 14 final winners were selected from a total of 116 applicants by a panel of both industry and academic experts. One of the larger grants ($750,000) was awarded for a proposal to establish a new Center for Biomedical Engineering in New York. This proposal is the result of a collaboration of three major institutions: City College of New York, which houses the engineering school of the City University of New York; the Hospital for Special Surgery, which is affiliated with Cornell University Medical School; and the Hospital for Joint Diseases, part of the New York University Medical School. The collaboration is the first training program of its kind in the New York metropolitan area. "One reason for establishing the center here in New York is that the city has the highest concentration of health-care delivery systems in the country, but no training program for biomedical engineers," says Sheldon Weinbaum, a professor of mechanical engineering at City Col- lege, and the principal investigator for the center. "The engineering school did not have the resources to start a large undergraduate/graduate program. With the two hospitals--the largest orthopedic facilities in the country--to provide the clinical training, it was a `perfect marriage.'" The three institutions have set up the program to incorporate an interdisciplinary curriculum with seven major themes, including the mechanics, transport, materials interaction, and imaging of cells and tissues; as well as medical instrumentation, physiology, and the socioeconomic impact of biomedical engineering. Each will have courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The center will be located at the school of engineering at City College, where all the courses will be taught. Students will get research and clinical experience at the two hospitals. Because of the specialization of the two hospitals in orthopedics, there will be an emphasis on training in musculoskeletal systems, says Weinbaum. "Undergraduate students will get the chance to work with physicians on both research and design proj-ects," says Peter A. Torzilli, a professor at Cornell University Medical College and the director of soft tissue research at the Hospital of Special Surgery. "This collaboration is truly unique--it's the first time public and private institutions are coming together like this." An additional thrust of this consortium will be to recruit a large number of minority students into bioengineering disciplines. "Currently, this country produces one minority graduate a year in the biomedical engineering field," says Weinbaum. "We hope to put out two or three minority graduates a year from our program alone," he says, adding that this target would be a natural outgrowth of the existing minority student body at City College. "We want to show that bioengineers can really bring something to the party," says John A. Quinn, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the principal investigator of a proposal titled "DNA/Silicon Technology as Molecular Bioengineering." "The scientific goal of this project is to scale DNA analysis down to the nano-level, and be able to conduct procedures like PCR on a single silicon [computer] chip," says Quinn, but he says that the main purpose of the grant is to "bring about a communication between various disciplines." The program will put graduate students from engineering into medical laboratories and clinics, where they can work side by side with researchers and doctors. This close contact while working on a specific problem will give the engineers a feel for the needs of the biological scientists and demonstrate the value of engineers in a clinical setting, Quinn says. The $250,000 award will go toward supporting three full-time graduate students in bioengineering, and will provide key equipment for the project. The University of Pennsylvania is also the home for another, $500,000 special opportunity award, this one for the establishment of a new graduate program in neuroengineering. Sponsored by the department of bioengineering and the Institute of Neurological Sciences, this program will include 15 faculty members whose fields of expertise cover neurology, electrical engineering, and cognitive psychology. The effort is headed by Leif Finkel, an associate professor of bioengineering. "We have already begun to set up a central facility for neuroengineering research," says Finkel. "There will be an educational lab for graduate students with 25 new workstations, as well as rooms to conduct psychophysical and neurological examinations." The laboratory's emphasis is on vision studies. Currently, graduate students are working to simulate the processes that enable the eye to discern the shape of an object from the texture of its surface. "What distinguishes our approach is that we are looking into the biological basis for neural function and using our knowledge of animal systems to design algorithms," says Finkel. "We hope to attract students from different backgrounds," says Finkel. "A key element will be the rotation of students in different labs; for instance, a psychology major will be asked to do a rotation in an electronics lab or in computer graphics, while a computer scientist would be put into a physiology lab ." A major aim is to find clinical applications for this research, though Finkel says this should come further down along the line. "One of the good things about an award like this [the special opportunity award] is that it allows us to build the infrastructure that would eventually lead to this goal," he says.

Whitaker Foundation Awards Aim To Inspire Innovation

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