The Biomedical Engineering Research Grants program was the foundation's first grant program. Beginning the year after the foundation was created in 1975, the Research Grants program was modeled after the philanthropic interests of U.A. Whitaker, who during his lifetime actively encouraged engineers, scientists, and physicians to join in solving problems in medicine and biology.

The program was formed when biomedical engineering was still relatively young, a time when there was a perception that biomedical engineers were at a disadvantage when competing for research support from the two largest government funding agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). NIH reviewers often saw biomedical engineering proposals as having too much science and engineering to qualify for NIH support, while NSF decision-makers viewed the same proposals as being too medically oriented.

The foundation recognized this as an opportunity to expand Whitaker's philanthropic interests to fill an unmet need in the research community. It established the Biomedical Engineering Research Grants Program, which offered three-year awards that enabled many young investigators for the first time to conduct research combining engineering and the life sciences.

The program grew from awarding only a handful of grants each of the first few years to making about 100 new awards annually in the 1990s. The Research Grants Program also evolved over the years into a career-development initiative that supplied young biomedical engineers with the resources to begin a laboratory and use research results to win additional funding from major government and private research sponsors. Research grant applications were reviewed not only for their ideas but for their promise that the principal investigator would become established in the field and go on to a productive career in biomedical engineering.

A recent survey of current and former research grantees showed that an overwhelming majority were still pursuing research based on their original Whitaker grant. Many earned further support from various key resources, including the NIH, NSF, the Department of Defense and other government sources, private foundations, and industry. Many had served on review panels for some -- and in a few cases, all -- of those same organizations.

Whitaker investigators have created more than 250 new products and devices and launched more than 100 companies to commercialize the results of their research, according to the survey. Investigators have invented new surgical instruments and techniques, new imaging technologies and applications of those technologies, new diagnostic tests, drug delivery devices, and scores of other implements for improving human health.

They have developed new methods for growing human tissues, such as cartilage and bone, developed gene therapies, created new approaches to growing nerve cells for transplant, developed sophisticated computer models for predicting disease severity, and made other advances in cellular and tissue engineering.

Over its lifespan, the Research Grants Program, and its related Transitional Funding, has invested nearly $275 million in the careers of young biomedical engineering investigators and their research to improve human health.

The foundation's searchable Investigator Directory contains name, grant title and grant year for all the nearly 1,500 awards made through the Research Grants Program, as well as contact information and a link to abstracts for many.

Click here to browse research abstracts by month and year awarded.