In May, the Department of Biomedical Engineering launched the Senior Project 2000 campaign to endow permanently the Adam Miller Senior Project Fund. The fund was set up to honor Adam Miller ('90), a research engineer at McDonnell Douglas Space System Corporation who died in an automobile accident in 1993. His classmates and colleagues felt the loss deeply and created the Adam Miller Senior Project Fund in his honor.

The goal for the Senior Project 2000 campaign is to create an endowment that will provide stable financial support for the Senior Project Program. Income from the endowment will pay expenses related to the Senior Project conference, present the Adam Miller Award annually to an outstanding BME senior, and fund student research projects as well as student-industry interactions, including workshops, a career panel, and guest lectures.

To accomplish this, BME is trying to raise $250,000 by May 1, 2000, the fifteenth anniversary of the Senior Project Program. Ezra Kucharz, Miller's roommate and fellow BME'90 graduate, is a major supporter of the fund. "Adam and I spoke frequently about the benefits the Senior Project Program had given us. We vowed to give back to the program that had given us so much," Kucharz says. "Adam was a dear friend to me and an enthusiastic ambassador for both the department and the program. I can't think of a better person to honor."

In the Senior Project Program, the capstone of the department's undergraduate curriculum, students develop a project proposal with an individual faculty member and carry it out over the course of the academic year. The program culminates in a daylong event, the Senior Project Conference, which is attended by the entire BME Department and representatives from hospitals and industry. Professor Ken Lutchen created the program in 1985 and has guided it successfully ever since. He was invited to discuss the program at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Engineering Education in 1994, and in 1998 he was the lead invited speaker at a National Science Foundation panel on "Design in Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Education."

Shortly after graduation, Miller wrote to Lutchen, now BME chairman: "BME at BU pushed me to strive for excellence and [showed] me that through hard work and diligence I can in fact attain high goals. I have been provided with a new definition of 'professionalism,' one which I will always work to maintain and hopefully teach others. I hope I can repay the favor some day."

To make a donation to the Adam Miller Senior Project Fund, or for more information, please call Ken Lutchen at 617/353-2805 or e-mail sp2000@bu.edu.