Cornell's Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) has received a four-year, $700,000 grant to help train Ph.D. students to work effectively at the interface of engineering science and medicine.

The grant, awarded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as part of its "Med‐into‐Grad Initiative," is intended to help future biomedical researchers in science and engineering develop an appreciation of medicine. The biomedical engineering program at Cornell is one of 12 new awardees.

"Providing a time and setting for BME students to learn firsthand how clinical medicine is practiced is a challenge for many BME departments, whether their medical school is across the street or across the state," said William Olbricht, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and the program's director. Other faculty members involved in the program are co-director Peter Doerschuk, professor of biomedical engineering; Chris Schaffer, assistant professor of biomedical engineering; and Shivaun Archer, senior lecturer in biomedical engineering.

The program involves close collaborations with clinical faculty members at Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) in New York City.

As part of the grant initiative, the BME department is developing Core Concepts in Disease, a new course for first-year graduate students that will cover how most diseases result from such limited biological mechanisms as infection, inflammation, genetic mutation, protein misfolding, metabolic disregulation and cancer. The course is organized into modules, co-taught by both Ithaca and WCMC faculty members, to convey the underlying biology of each mechanism, the clinical management of related diseases and the technology involved in various therapies.

The new grant also supports BME's Summer Immersion Term, which has been a hallmark of BME education at Cornell for more than a decade. BME students live and work at WCMC and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for seven weeks during their first summer at Cornell. They are assigned a clinical faculty mentor at WCMC who provides introduction to clinical research through a mini-research project based on their clinical practice. The new grant will help increase the number of students in the Summer Immersion Term.

The grant will also support four one-year fellowships for students whose doctoral research is co-mentored by Ithaca and WCMC faculty members.