Illinois Medicine

BIOENGINEERING A The department of bioengineering's return to the COM means more opportunity for research collaboration bioengineering program has been in place at University of Illinois' Chicago campus for along, this department in the College of Engineering has been interacting on many projects with many departments in the College of Medicine." Tobacman, who's also a professor of medicine and physiology & most of the past half-century. It began in 1965 supported by three institu- tions: the department of information engineering, the department of physiology at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and the department of biomedical engineering at Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital. After several organizational iterations (see timeline on facing page), in the 1980s bioengineering became a department solely within the College of Engineering. Then, last August, bioengineering returned to its joint roots as a dual-college department that bridges Engineering and Medicine. "People with different skill sets combine them and do something they never dreamed of; it leads to good things," says Thomas Royston, PhD, department of bioengineering head. "You look at places in both the private sector and in academia where great research breakthroughs are happening; it's where institutions are bringing together people with different backgrounds." A combination of internal and external forces compelled the biophysics as well as a participant in the search committee that selected Royston, notes the department has become the first on campus to stretch across two colleges. "As part of a search for a new head of the department … both colleges and the provost were excited to buy into the possibility of creating a department that bridged both colleges," he says. Royston adds that when the search for a new department head university to officially restructure the department, says Royston, who first joined the department of mechanical engineering in 1995 and was named head of bioengineering in August after serving as interim head for two years (see sidebar, page 32). Internally, the department's research increasingly has taken the form of joint engineering-medicine projects. Other top bioengineering programs across the country, such as those at Johns Hopkins and Stan- ford universities, also have begun forging more formal joint ties between engineering and medicine. And bioengineering careers are expected to flourish, according to 2008 U.S. Department of Labor statistics, which projected biomedical engineering jobs would grow 72 percent by 2018. "There already has been a lot of interaction in terms of joint re- search and mentoring of students," Royston says. "Every year there's new collaborations. A lot of our investigators here [at Engineering] have co- investigators in the faculty of the College of Medicine. It certainly enables a more substantial investment in the department than would be possible in the College of Engineering." "It's in the nature of bioengineering to be collaborative," adds Larry Tobacman, MD, senior associate dean for research at the College of Medicine and director of the Medical Scientist Training Program. "All B began two years ago, after University Distinguished Professor Richard Magin, PhD, stepped down (he remains in the department), the notion of a merged department was not explicitly on the table. But a few of the external candidates independently had the same thought: "Why in the world aren't you doing this? You have all the ingredients." Added to the recipe will be a home at the College of Medicine to support faculty and student research on the west side of campus. "There are already joint projects, and we hope for more in the future," Tobac- man says. "There is already space for this department on west campus, and now we expect to further build their presence on this side of the campus, to facilitate the collaborations that can be advanced by having people near one another." ROAD-SCOPE, CORE FACULTY in the bioengineer- ing department focus on subjects like computational systems biology, MRI and live cell imaging, cell and tissue engineering, neural engineering and biomo- lecular engineering. Over the years, faculty in the program have developed cutting-edge computational methods for reverse engineering genetic networks, and they have built a large database of protein surfaces used by researchers worldwide. They have pioneered high- field MR elastography imaging, laser microsurgery, techniques for brain injury rehabilitation, diagnostic tools for glaucoma, implantable organs and engineered tissues, and microfluidic devices designed to hunt for elusive circulating tumor cells. Examples of recent engineering-medicine collaborations include that of Bioengineering Professor Jie Liang and COM Professor Linda Kenney, of the department of microbiology and immunology, who are winding up a five-year, $1.1 million NIH grant for a project on "Compu- tational Assembly of Beta Barrel Membrane Protein." Their project, scheduled to end Feb. 29 but for which they have submitted a competitive renewal application for an additional five ILLINOIS MEDICINE | 31

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