College news
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Congratulations
to 2009 recipients
of prestigious Grainger awards
On April 14, 2009, nearly 50 University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering faculty, staff, students, friends and family members gathered for a banquet at the University of Wisconsin Foundation. A celebration of Grainger Power Engineering Award and Fellowship recipients, the event honored nine electrical and computer engineering students who already are making meaningful contributions in their field. Sponsored by The Grainger Foundation, the awards recognize students for their academic success in the field of power engineering. Pictured (back row, from left): College of Engineering Dean Paul Peercy, Marcus Hammonds, Robert Sandy, Andrew Redon, Adam Anders and Jonathan Lee; (front row) Adam Hughes, Zeb Breuckman, Brenton Smith and Jeffrey Gobeli.
Masters awarded nearly $1.7M from NIH
Biomedical Engineering Assistant Professor Kristyn Masters has received $1.67 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for her project, “Creating engineered models of valvular disease to study anti-calcific therapies.” With Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Kevin Turner and University of Pittsburgh Biomedical Engineering Professor Michael Sacks, Masters will use tissue-engineering techniques to produce physiologically relevant in vitro models of diseased heart valves, and then use these disease models as platforms for testing therapeutic treatments such as statin drugs. The researchers hope that the tailored diseased valve environments will offer a controlled and readily available culture system for studying the effects of various agents on valve function and elucidating biological mechanisms that contribute to the progression of native valve disease.
Project HealthDesign
funding continued
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has approved $5.3 million to continue funding for Project HealthDesign, an initiative designed to create a new generation of personal health record systems led by Lillian S. Moehlman-Bascom Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Nursing Patti Brennan. The grant, which brings total project funding to approximately $10 million, will support a program that engages four to six grantee teams to demonstrate how to improve people’s heath by enabling them to record, interpret and act on health information that emerges in the course of their daily living. An important component of the new project will be to demonstrate how these observations of daily living can be integrated into the clinical practice workflow, helping patients and clinicians best manage chronic illness.
Vaccine-delivery technology licensed
FluGen Inc., an emerging leader in development, production and delivery of influenza vaccines and related products, announced in late March that it will license patented vaccine-delivery technology developed by Biomedical Engineering Professor David Beebe and colleagues. With funding from the Department of Biomedical Engineering W.H. Coulter Foundation Translational Research Partnership award, Beebe’s team developed the technology, a disposable, palm-sized “patch” that adheres to the skin and combines a microfluidic pump and microneedle array to deliver drugs. Based on the technology, Beebe and colleagues formed the medical device spinoff company Ratio.