By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer
Aug. 1, 2001 — Boston University has won a $14 million grant from the Whitaker Foundation for its biomedical engineering department and has begun recruiting faculty for a new bioMEMS and nanofabrication center.
Tejal Desai, 29, a rising star in bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), has been lured to
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The grant was announced this week, but Lutchen had learned of it in June and was able to use knowledge of the award – and the money that goes with it – to recruit Desai. The money will be spread out over five years and will be matched with $18 million from the school.
“She’s already well known in the field for the impact she’s had on tissue engineering through nanotechnology and bioMEMS,” Lutchen said Wednesday.
“They’re building a center for bioMEMS and that tipped the scale,” said Desai, who upon receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, was hired as the first faculty member of that school’s new department of bioengineering. In 1999, she was named one of the top 100 young researchers in the country by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review Magazine.
“We called senior people in the field and asked for their opinion of the best young scientist we could approach, and she was the first person they mentioned,” Lutchen said. One of them, he said, was Mehmet Toner, of Harvard Medical School and Massachussetts General Hospital.
Desai’s work has included designing permeable microcapsules that are undergoing studies at UIC on diabetic rats. The 2-by-2-millimeter devices are packed with pancreatic cells from healthy animals. The silicon membranes are punctured with holes in the 10- to 20-nanometer range, which is large enough to allow oxygen and nutrients such as glucose to flow in and insulin to flow out. But the holes are tiny enough to keep antibodies and white blood cells out, keeping the body’s immune system at bay.
“She’s a gem of a gem of a scientist. She’s absolutely a top-tier academic and scientist,” said Mauro Ferrari, her faculty adviser at Berkeley who is now director of the new biomedical engineering center at Ohio State, which is scheduled to open in September. “I’ve recruited the heck out of her, but I couldn’t come close to what they are offering in Boston.”
Boston University founded its biomedical engineering department in 1966. “We were already one of the largest departments in the country, and we have a lot of strength in basic science,” Lutchen said. “What we needed was significant growth in applied science. What we need to be world class is cellular and subcellular engineering in micro and nanobioMEMS.”
Lutchen said the grant will be used to hire 12 faculty, bringing the department staffing to 35. He has hired Joe Tien, a bioMEMS post-doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, Desai will join BU in January and Lutchen said he will hire at least three more faculty who specialize in small tech.
Lutchen said BU will build a new biomedical engineering building. In the meantime, nearly two entire floors of the current building will be renovated for the new thrust.
“We’re going to build a world-leading research program in tissue engineering linked to nanosystems and bioMEMS technology,” he said.
Several new graduate courses will be created in bioMEMS and the undergraduate curriculum improved, he said.
The grant to BU, called the Leadership Award, was just the third given by the foundation. Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Diego won the first two, in 1998. It was the first announced as a result of a solicitation the foundation made in March of 2000.
Other proposals are still being evaluated and several more could be announced this year, according to Frank Blanchard, director of communications for the foundation.
Also on July 30, it was announced that the University of California, Davis had been granted a $12 million Leadership-Development Award to develop a new undergraduate biomedical engineering program, buy new lab equipment and hire five new faculty within three years.
The Whitaker Foundation, based in Arlington, Va., was funded in 1975 on a bequest by Uncas A. Whitaker, an engineer and inventor. Since then, it has been the largest private funder of biomedical engineering research in the United States. It also sponsors individual university researchers and provides internships and fellowships
Foundation directors have announced that they will liquidate their $400 million fund by the end of 2006.
“We can have a much greater impact on the field of biomedical engineering by putting all the resources out instead of trickling them out over time,” Blanchard said.
“Biomedical engineering is really starting to take off, and we felt that what this field really needed now was a jump start, and this was the best way to do it.”
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-528-6292.