Announcements

Undergraduate students at Rensselaer have been extremely successful with their applications for Society of Women Engineer's scholarships. A total of 14 Rensselaer students received SWE scholarships, four of these students are enrolled in BME. The BME RPI Dorothy M. and Earl S.

Juergen Hahn has been elected as the Program Coordinator for 2017 for AIChE's Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) division 10B. The duties of the program coordinator are to plan and oversee the activities related to AIChE conferences involving computing and systems technology sessions. One of his responsibilities will be to serve on the Board of Directors of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) in 2018.

Seven biomedical engineering students will be honored with Rensselaer's Founders awards. The award recipients are: Junior: Omar T. Abdoun, Carolyn Chlebek, Jorge D. Zhingre Sanchez Senior: Thomas A. Vaccaro Graduate Student: Anthony Certo, John F. Drazan, Nicholas J. Schaub The Founders Award of Excellence was established in 1994 to honor students who embody qualities of creativity, discovery, leadership, and the values of pride and responsibility at Rensselaer.

Leo Wan, an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department, has been selected to receive the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

Ge Wang has received a multimillion dollar four year grant from NIH to work on a "High Dose Efficiency CT System" under the multi-PI U01 mechanism. The key points about the project are as follows. X-ray computed tomography (CT) is a corner stone of hospitals and clinics. There are 100 million CT scans annually worldwide. The high impact of CT has led to rapidly increased utilization, and at the same time public concern about the potential risk of x-ray radiation to patients.

The recent accreditation effort was successful and the Biomedical Engineering Department has been accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET, http://www.abet.org, for another six years.

A gift from the estate of J. Lawrence Katz has created the J. Lawrence and Gertrude Katz Award in Biomedical Engineering. Income from this fund will be used to annually provide an award to the outstanding graduating senior receiving a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering. The award will be given at the graduation ceremony in May. J. Lawrence Katz was a long time faculty member at RPI and the founding department head of the BME department. He served in that capacity from 1974-1985. The department is delighted to receive this generous gift from our late colleague.

General Electric has donated a GE Global Research Universal CT Benchtop to Ge Wang's laboratory. The equipment has an estimated value of $1M and will be a key piece of equipment for Dr. Wang's research.