MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
n
academic department is like a family, where everyone has a familial
role. Corrine Bahr was our department’s
mother figure. We were deeply saddened to lose Corrine, who died on
April 8, following a courageous battle with cancer.
Corrine worked at the University of Wisconsin for
38 years, most recently as the first BME department administrator. She
shared in our dream from the start, and helped guide us in our department’s
inception, development and growth. We set out to have a department that
was like no other, where faculty, staff and students felt at home, and
she was central in building that home and creating a department with
heart. We lost a piece of the heart of our department and we will deeply
miss her.
In her memory, the department is proud to establish
an award that recognizes the BME graduate student who best exemplifies
the ideals and principles by which Corrine lived, and to offer funds
for this student to lead a significant activity of their own design
that fulfills the spirit of this award to provide leadership and service
to the department. More information on this award can be found in this
issue of the BME Monitor (see Graduate
student service award honors Corrine Bahr).
There were several new and exciting events this year
for our department. The first Tong Biomedical Engineering Design Awards
were awarded to BME students, raising the level of distinction in our
unique experiential learning BME undergraduate program where every student
works on a real-world client-based design project every semester. Winners
were announced at The 5th Annual BME Translational
Research and Design Conference and Expo: The Convergence of Biomedical
Engineering Research, Design and Commercialization, which was
held in May in our building.
The Tong Biomedical Engineering Design Follow-On
Awards were also recently announced. Read about these in this issue
of our newsletter (see ?).
The University of Wisconsin recently was designated
a “Kauffman Campus” with the award of a $5 million grant
from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Under that grant, the BME
department will introduce a series of new graduate courses in the upcoming
year that will offer a collaborative translational research process
to foster innovation that is an extension and expansion of our Coulter
Foundation Translational Research Partnership process. It is entitled,
“The biome Project.”
The word biome is a term
every biologist should know; a biome is an interacting local group of
distinctive biological communities. It is also an acronym for Bio
Innovations and Opportunities
in Medicine and Engineering.
You will hear more about this exciting and unique new graduate educational
program as it is launched later this year.
As always, we like to hear from our alumni, industrial
partners and friends, and I invite you to stay in touch.
Robert
G. Radwin
Room 2130 Engineering Centers Building
1550 Engineering Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1609
Tel: 608/263-4660
Fax: 608/265-9239
E-mail: bme@engr.wisc.edu
