Bioscience and Bioengineering at Rice Receive $750,000 Boost

Contact: Philip Montgomery
Phone: 713-831-4792

Biosciences and Bioengineering at Rice Receive $750,000 Boost

The Rice Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering
received a $750,000 award to create a graduate degree program in
biomedical engineering and to add two new faculty members.

The Washington D.C.-based Whitaker Foundation’s Special
Opportunity Award allows Rice "to expand the frontiers of research
in the areas of cellular and tissue engineering and to implement a
cross-disciplinary graduate degree program in biomedical
engineering," said Larry McIntire, chair of the Institute of
Biosciences and Bioengineering.

The foundation notified McIntire, the E.D. Butcher Professor of
Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, in November that Rice had
received the award, which will be applied during the next three
years.

The foundation gives the award for the development of permanent,
high-quality programs that will have a lasting effect on education
and research rather than on solving specific research problems. The
Whitaker Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation that
encourages and supports research and training in biomedical
engineering.

Biomedical engineering and tissue engineering both involve the
application of engineering methods of analysis, frequently on a
cellular level, to solve problems in clinical medicine and the life
sciences.

"Cellular and tissue engineering are fields with enormous
potential to make truly significant contributions to mankind over
the next decades," said McIntire in his proposal to the foundation.

McIntire said biomedical and tissue engineering will lead to new
medical therapies customized to match the biology of specific
patients. These therapies will use cells, tissues and eventually
organs perfectly matched to the patient to treat illnesses.

The award will help Rice meet what McIntire foresees as a
growing demand for biomedical and tissue engineers capable of
developing and delivering the new forms of therapy.

To meet the need for biomedical engineers, McIntire will develop
at Rice a master’s and a doctoral program in biomedical engineering
coupled with the new faculty positions.

"We propose to develop a graduate program to provide these
engineers, taking advantage of Rice’s tradition of excellence in
cross-disciplinary research and education and its long-standing
record of productive research and training collaborations with
institutions in the Texas Medical Center," said McIntire.

One of the new faculty members will provide expertise in
nanometer to micron-scale materials engineering, while the second
faculty member will specialize in computation using advanced
parallel processing.

Rice University is an independent, coeducational, nonsectarian
private university dedicated to undergraduate teaching and graduate
studies, research and professional training in selected disciplines.
It has an undergraduate student population of 2,572, a graduate and
professional student population of 1,375 and afull-time faculty of
448.

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