$5 million grant to fund new major

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by Chet Kapoor

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The Whitaker Foundation has awarded Rice and the Baylor College of Medicine a $5 million Development Award to develop a center of excellence in biomedical engineering education. The award, which is the second multimillion-dollar grant that Rice has received within the last two weeks, was announced by President Malcolm Gillis Wednesday.

"We are immensely pleased that the Whitaker Foundation has seen fit to bestow its blessing upon the Rice-Baylor collaboration in this field," Gillis said. "I am especially happy that this award will enable us to offer undergraduates a new major in a field of such significance for science and medicine in the 21st century."

The Development Award will be paid over a period of six years. It will be used to establish a new Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rice, to develop a new undergraduate program in biomedical engineering and to provide critical mass in faculty and students in the research areas of cellular and tissue engineering.

"This award will allow Rice to nearly double its bioengineering faculty and provide a realistic chance of being the top research institution for biomedical engineering in the country in another six years," said Larry McIntire, chair of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering and project director of the Development Award.

Baylor College of Medicine President Ralph D. Feigin said he was "hopeful that significant progress will be made in developing a new generation of therapeutic medications and procedures."

Six new faculty members will be added, four with principal appointments at Rice and two joint appointments at Baylor College of Medicine. Three areas will be targeted for rapid research progress: cell replacement therapy, computational and living engineered model systems and characterization of tissue structure and function.

Rice will receive $1 million in the first year, which will be used to renovate space for the new Department of Biomedical Engineering, including undergraduate laboratory space and to purchase new equipment to support cellular and tissue engineering research and new courses. Rice will then receive $500,000 annually in the following years, which will be used as start-up funds for new faculty and to support biomedical engineering graduate fellowships.

"We've been spectacularly excited. This is probably the largest prize in biomedical engineering that is up for competition," said Joel Moake, associate director of the John W. Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering.

One of the reasons Rice received the grant was because it is one of the few schools that have "highly-ranked" bioengineering programs without having a bioengineering department, according to Moake.

In the field of biomedical engineering, Rice ranked fourth nationally in graduate teaching effectiveness and 10th in scholarly quality of the faculty, according to the National Research Council's in-depth study of United States graduate programs released last year.

This item appeared in the News section of the March 29, 1996 issue.

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