The campus's rising programs linking biology and engineering grew again recently, with the creation of a new division of biomedical engineering. Currently, 60 students and 40 faculty members participate in the graduate group, concentrating primarily on courses and research in biomechanics. With the addition of the new division, the research and academic programs in biomedical engineering will be greatly expanded. New areas under development include cellular and molecular mechanics, biological and medical imaging and biological microsystems. Also, an undergraduate program in biomedical engineering will be administered by the new division. "This will allow us to increase our prominence in biomedical engineering and recruit additional excellent students and faculty," said engineering associate dean James Shackleford. By 2006, the division expects to have 14 full-time faculty members and to be housed in the planned Genomics and Biomedical Sciences Building. An application to advance the division to department status will be filed this year. Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles to medical problems. UC Davis is particularly well suited for teaching and research in the field, with so many related programs right at hand, including the schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, the Center for Comparative Medicine, UC Davis Medical Center, extensive programs in the life sciences and, of course, the College of Engineering. "Around the country, there are about 80 similar departments, but very few have the range of resources we have here at Davis," said the inaugural chair of the division, professor Katherine Ferrara. "We have the opportunity to build a leading program." A key source of private funds in the field nationally, The Whitaker Foundation, recognized that potential and gave the campus $2.1 million to help establish the new division and hire three new faculty members. Ferrara earned her doctorate in electrical engineering here in 1989. She was a faculty member at California State University, Sacramento, Cornell University and the University of Virginia before she returned to UC Davis last summer. Ferrara's laboratory investigates new methods to map blood flow and is primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health. In the past year, Ferrara's laboratory has received four research awards, including The Whitaker Foundation's George W. Thorn Award, which provides a $10,000 grant for her research on using ultrasound imaging to monitor blood flow in glaucoma. The new division has two more new, full-time faculty members-Michael Insana, who studies medical imaging, biomechanics and the use of ultrasound, and Scott Simon, who studies the interplay of stress and strain at the cellular and molecular levels. One more full-time division faculty member is expected to arrive this summer. Ferrara, Insana and Simon have $6 million in grant funding and support about 14 graduate students. Ferrara is just completing a new, five-year, $15 million grant proposal for The Whitaker Foundation, which would provide funding for the Genome and Biomedical Sciences Building and for equipment and fellowships for new faculty and students. For more information about the biomedical engineering division's research programs, see a recent news story in Engineering Progress, a quarterly publication of the College of Engineering.