White Elected President of the Biomedical Engineering Society

By Liz Sheeley

John White
Professor John White

Professor John White (BME) has been elected the next president of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the leading professional society for biomedical engineers. He will begin his term as President-Elect in October, following two years as President and a fourth and final year as Past-President.

White has been involved with BMES for more than 20 years. He has chaired the annual meeting, served as the National Meetings Committee chair, secretary, treasurer, Executive Committee member, member of the Fellows Selection Committee and member of the Development Committee.

“We’ve done a very good job of making ourselves the best go-to meeting for academics in our field,” says White. “But as president I want to increase industry representation in the society, and create a more outward facing organization.”

Beginning with 269 founding members in 1968, BMES now has more than 8,000 members. It is committed to continue supporting the biomedical engineering workforce for advanced education, research, and healthcare technology.

By bringing more industry leaders onto the BMES board of directors, which is currently about a quarter corporate, White said he can listen to the needs from insiders. Then BMES can roll out programs that industry workers want in order to implement the most effective programming, perhaps starting with better professional development programs for those in industry.

He says that as chair of the BME Department at BU, he is also working to increase industry and academic relations to advance partnerships inside the University. Creating those connections allows research and ideas to be brought into practice faster and more efficiently so that the process from lab to clinic is streamlined.

“I want to create an environment where we can work productively with industry and promote translational biomedical work,” he says. “Because that’s where the patient impact is.”

White employs engineering approaches to better understand how information is processed in the brain. Combining computational modeling, electrophysiological and optical techniques, and imaging methods, he and his team have worked to advance new biomedical devices to understand memory disorders and epilepsy.

A Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, White has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and as a principal or co-principal investigator has raised over $50 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, private foundations, and other sources.