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First group of NIH scholars earn BME degrees at CCNY
The college aims to be a model for minority biomedical engineering education
 The first cohort of students supported by a new
$2.5 million grant to City College of New York’s
(CCNY) department of biomedical engineering (BME)
have graduated. The Grove School of Engineering at CCNY, which is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, was awarded the funds in 2006 to
create a “national urban model for minority biomedical engineering education.”
The funds are being distributed over five years; the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) administers the grant.
The latest funds represent a renewal of a $2.2 million award the school received in 2001; the CCNY program
is the only life sciences school to have its initial NIH
grant renewed.
Minority students chosen for NIH scholarships must
be majoring or pursuing an emphasis in biomedical engineering (BME). A minimum 3.0 GPA is required. Scholars receive full tuition and a $6,000 stipend plus
an additional $4,000 research stipend during junior
and senior years. A mentoring program pairs PhD candidates with undergrads as they gain hands-on research experience.
2008 graduates are grateful
“The scholarship gave me a confidence boost,” says Ndongo Khouma, one of the program’s 2008 graduates.
“I don’t know how I would have managed without it.”
He praises the faculty for its commitment to students: ensuring that they kept up with each class and learned something of value.
Khouma credits grant administrator Dr Phillip Payton with supporting him and fellow students. He remembers days when he felt too busy to prepare research progress reports, a requirement of the program. “When the going got tough, Dr Payton kept us on track,” he says.
A BME degree fulfils career goals
Khouma initially wanted to be a doctor, but he was interested in math and electronics as well. “My father taught me to fix things around the house and I found that I really liked doing that, so I went the engineering route,” he says.
Khouma began studying computational math at the Gaston Berger University (Saint Louis, Senegal). He switched to ME when he moved with his family from Senegal to New York in 2002.
But that discipline still wasn’t right for him. A brochure about CCNY’s BME program caught his attention. “It had the medical side, but wasn’t too far from technical occupations,” he says.
When Dr Payton saw that Khouma had a 3.9 GPA after a year at CCNY, he invited him to apply for an NIH scholarship. An interview followed to ensure that Khouma’s research and grad school interests were a fit for the program.
Tracking vital signs in space
All students earning a degree with a BME emphasis are required to write a personal statement describing their reasons for pursuing BME. The program also requires each scholar to complete a senior design project. Khouma worked with a team that developed a wireless ECG monitoring system prototype for NASA. Their challenge was to create a device to measure the effect of reduced gravity on an astronaut’s vital signs to track the functions of heart, brain and muscles.
Khouma explains that astronauts may suffer adverse bone and muscle effects under reduced gravity. The device would allow remote health monitoring using Bluetooth technology. “My team focused on monitoring heart arrhythmias,” he says.
Today Khouma is an engineer at Merck (Whitehouse Station, NJ). He’s working on vaccination technology at its West Point, PA facility. He plans to start a BME masters in February and eventually seek a PhD.
A professor’s dream
The grant was a vindication of Dr Sheldon Weinbaum’s life’s work. “I’ve had a personal commitment to engineering education for women and minorities for many, many years,” says the distinguished professor emeritus and principal investigator of the grant.
Weinbaum was one of the senior faculty who created the biomedical engineering department. “We wanted to make a department that would be extraordinary in quality and have a diverse student population,” he explains.
He notes that the school has some distinguishing characteristics that make it a good education model. Along with its history of diversity, half the tenure track faculty are women and minorities.
Industry support
The school also benefits from having an NIH advisory board made up of industry leaders, including Procter & Gamble (Cincinnati, OH), GE Global Research Center (Niskayuna, NY), Genzyme (Cambridge, MA), Boston Scientific (Natick, MA), Medtronic (Minneapolis, MN), Stryker Orthopedics (Mahwah, NJ) and Gilead Sciences (Foster City, CA).
Weinbaum retired in the Fall of 2007, but is still an active researcher as well as the Principal Investigator on the NIH grant. He notes that the NIH grant might have gone to a program in biology or biochemistry. “We feel very fortunate we were able to apply it to BME,” he says.
NIH scholars excel
The NIH funding can support twenty-five students a year. It also provides a PhD-level mentor for each scholar, funding for the scholar’s research projects, and teaching assistants for the more challenging core courses. The added support has helped bump the retention of NIH scholars from 70 to more than 90 percent and increased the average GPA to 3.5. The average GPA for non-NIH scholars in BME is 3.3.
Many of CCNY’s students are commuters who work and go to school at the same time. The program has enabled its students to give up or reduce outside work to concentrate on their studies and research.
More time for study
Angela Jimenez was able to cut back on her working hours when she received her award.
She has supported herself since she was seventeen, a year after moving to the U.S. from Colombia. With the NIH grant, “I was able to dedicate more time to my studies,” she says.
Jimenez received the NIH scholarship as a chemical engineering student pursuing an emphasis in BME, studying targeted DNA delivery using self-assembled peptides. “I went for this concentration because I like doing research on biological systems, especially things that are related to improving human health,” she says.
Jimenez says the NIH Scholars are a close group, “When I needed something I never hesitated to ask.” She found the graduate mentors helpful in offering guidance on grad school or getting a job. “They helped us find summer internships and they gave feedback on oral presentations and essays,” she says.
Jimenez is now doing research at the Universite de Rennes 1 in Rennes, France. She will be applying to grad school at the end of the year.
Scholars often continue
their education
“There’s an emphasis on having students go on to higher level education,” says BME department chair Dr John Tarbell. “The research component is one way we encourage that progression.”
NIH scholar Jaafar Tindi grew up in Kenya and moved to the Bronx with his family in 2002. The research and interdisciplinary aspects of BME drew him to the program. “I liked biochemistry, math and physics and I didn’t want to go into just one of those fields,” he says. “BME combined all of them.”
But Tindi wasn’t totally committed to the program until he attended an introductory course. Listening to faculty talk about the impact of their research intrigued him. “You could develop an artificial heart that can save someone’s life,” he says.
Tindi is now working on his MD-PhD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University (Bronx, NY). “In the lab you don’t see the impact your work will have on people,”
he says. “I wanted to merge the clinical aspect of medicine with my research.” His current program is also fully funded by the NIH.
A continuing diversity emphasis
Tarbell looks forward to seeing where these graduates go in the long run. He expects their success to help continue the tradition of diversity even after the NIH funding ends in 2010.
“I hope the program continues to attract outstanding undergrads,” he says.
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