Departments
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Week of 2 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 29 |
Feature Article
Biomedical engineers honored for research, leadership
By Eric McHenry
It's been a banner year and a half for two scholars in the ENG department of biomedical engineering. Both Herbert Voigt, associate professor, and Kenneth Lutchen, associate professor and department chairman, have pulled professional hat tricks since the beginning of 1998: each has been thrice honored by his peers.
Voigt was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows, a distinction accorded to the nation's top 2 percent of biomedical engineers, early last year. He was subsequently voted president of one of AIMBE's constituent organizations, the Biomedical Engineering Society. In his first act as president-elect he wrote a million-dollar grant proposal, which the Whitaker Foundation approved in January. The money will enable a broad-based enhancement of the society's administrative branch.
Lutchen was inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows on March 12 of this year, which set the stage for his election as vice-chair of the institute's Academic Council. He will assume the chairmanship in 2000, and will at that point also become a member of the AIMBE board of directors. His appointment as department chairman in August qualified him to be elected treasurer of the Council of Chairs, a consortium of undergraduate biomedical engineering program directors from throughout the country.
Voigt says the honors have occasioned a succession of equally gratifying gestures from his BU colleagues and students, including a standing ovation from one of his classes and a bouquet of flowers from the BU student chapter of the BMES.
"Those are things that I feel very gratified by," he says. "The million dollars is just another plum. It's going to allow us to do really nice things for our student members and for our industrial members."
They will include the creation of membership incentives for students and the inauguration of a large jobs fair at the BMES annual meeting. The jobs fair will put graduating biomedical engineers in direct contact with people from industry, many of whom represent small start-up companies that need talent but don't have the wherewithal to recruit aggressively.
The Whitaker grant will also help fund consolidation of the BMES administrative and editorial offices in one Washington, D.C., location, and the hiring of a new executive director. The society will be able to continue making its journal, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, available for free on the Internet through 2000 and step up its publication pace from bimonthly to monthly by 2001.
Voigt and Lutchen agree that a twofold sense of satisfaction has accompanied their recent accolades: they have been recognized both as scientists and as spokesmen for their discipline. Lutchen is grateful to the AIMBE College of Fellows for inducting him, he says, because it is an affirmation of his research, which concerns the structure and function of the human lung. He and associates have been using a novel system of identification and modeling approaches, including computer modeling, to "improve our understanding of human lung structure and function, with particular emphasis on how they are altered during certain diseases such as asthma and emphysema," he says.
Moreover, votes of confidence such as Voigt's election as president of BMES, his securing of the Whitaker grant, and Lutchen's election as vice-chair of the Academic Council constitute "recognition of our dedication to the profession, and of our ability to represent it at the highest level," Lutchen says. He plans to spread that recognition around, he adds, as a member of the AIMBE College of Fellows.
"The only way to get into the college is to have someone who's already a fellow nominate you," he says. "I believe we've had, as a department, people worthy of fellowship for many years, and I intend to nominate several people in our department now."