Walter Herzog, Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Kinesiology.
/ Photo: Jason Stang

June 2, 2009

CREATING The Next Generation
of Biomedical Engineers

An innovative grant from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Institute (NSERC) will provide the University of Calgary with $1.6 million over the next six years, providing a platform that could help create the next generation of biomedical engineers.

The funding is being provided under NSERC’s new Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) Program. The idea behind CREATE is to give science graduates enhanced skills for careers in industry, government or academia.The NSERC CREATE grant for 21st Century Biomedical Engineers will provide the University of Calgary with $150,000 this year and $300,000 over each of the following five years.

“What is so unique about this grant,” says Dr. Walter Herzog, Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of Kinesiology, “is the multi-disciplinary nature of the funding, and the fact that it is available to every level of student, from undergraduate, to graduate and post-doc.”

The grant, which includes the Faculties of Kinesiology, Engineering, Science, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and Nursing, requires Grad students to have two supervisors from different faculties or holding very different areas of expertise.  It will also train three different types of students.

The first is an academic stream in which students split their time between the U of C and one of several partner Universities around the world. The second is an entrepreneurial stream in which students spend part of their time working with or for biomedical companies and learning how industry translates knowledge into the ‘real world’. The third type of student is a person with clinical interests and background who will be trained as a clinician-scientist.

Herzog says that in many ways the grant is creating a new kind of scientist for the 21st Century. “It used to be that scientists of my generation became very knowledgeable in a small piece of the puzzle. This grant should create a scientist who is more like a renaissance scientist - a scientist conversant in several areas, who has the big picture in view at all times. I believe this is the future of science.”

Herzog believes the innovative program should attract top students from around the world and could go a long way in helping to build UofC’s growing biomedical engineering program. “Do I believe it will have an impact? Absolutely I do.”

The first students to be admitted into the program will be four undergraduate summer students, the first graduate students and postdoctoral trainees are slated to begin in the fall semester.