Message from the Chair

--Bill Ditto
The University of Florida’s “new” Department of Biomedical Engineering is now over five years old and as such it is appropriate to reflect upon some of the accomplishments of our faculty, staff and students over the past five years. Some numbers:
  • Grown to a dozen core faculty members
  • Tripled the number of our PhD students
  • Conferred 80 degrees (25 PhDs and 55 Masters)
  • Raised the Departmental Endowment to over $22M
  • Become the first named department at the University of Florida
  • Received over $11M in gifts and donations from the J. Crayton Pruitt, Sr. family, Shepard Broad Foundation, and Alpha One Foundation
  • Attracted millions of dollars in funding from NIH, NSF, ONR, and Industry
  • Generated over $60M in direct investments into BME and over $120M in total resources impacting our department
  • New $94M, 170K gsf Biomedical Sciences Building (opening early 2009) that will house the department
I am excited that the next five years will see even more growth and discovery. I want to thank all of our faculty, staff, graduate students and generous benefactors for all their help over the years. 		     

Professor Jiang Promoted to SPIE Fellow

Professor Huabei Jiang was recently promoted to the Fellowship of SPIE — The International Society for Optical Engineering due to having “made pioneering contributions to diffuse optical tomography” and fluorescence tomography.

Ding Awarded $1.3M NIH Grant

Mingzhou Ding has recently been awarded a grant from the NIH to study the disruption of the neural mechanisms that control anticipatory attention and which are implicated in neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Bruce Wheeler Named IEEE Fellow

Bruce Wheeler was recently named an IEEE Fellow for his “Contributions to the Neuroengineering of in vitro Experimental Systems.” This is a well deserved honor.

Professor Jiang Named AIMBE Fellow

Professor Huabei Jiang was recently named a 2007 Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering for “his creative and pioneering work in the imaging and detection of Breast Cancer and other debilitating diseases.”

Highlights

Neural Stem Cells and Inflammation: Implications for Alzheimers Disease

Brandi Ormerod was awarded a Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Research Foundation Extramural grant to study how inflammation transmits from the body to the brain and how neuro- inflammation (inflammation of the brain) instructs stem cells located within the adult hippocampus, which is an area important some types of learning and memory. This information will be essential for developing stem cell strategies to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers, which are always accompanied by neuroinflammation. Read about the award here.

UF Top Public University In Tech Transfer

The University of Florida is the top-performing public institution at transferring its research to the marketplace, according to a major new study by the prestigious Milken Institute. Read the whole article here.

New Scientist Features UF Study

New Scientist just published a story titled “Laser beams to the brain reveal seizures in real time”, which features our epilepsy study. View the article online here.

New Building

Check out the progress of our new building via this Live Webcam. The building is going up fast and we are all very excited about moving into our state of the art new departmental and research facilities adjacent to Shands Health Science Center, College of Engineering and the College of Medicine.

Dr. Bruce Wheeler To Join Faculty

Dr. Bruce Wheeler, noted neuroengineer and founding chair of the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois will be joining our department as a professor starting Fall 2008. Dr. Wheeler is currently the editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. We are very fortunate to have such an accomplished member of the Biomedical Engineering community join our growing faculty.


© 2006 J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering.