BREAKING NEWS

New biomed engineering chair thrives on ‘change’

University of California, Davis
September 25, 2009
By Liese Greensfelder

You may as well race against Lance Armstrong as try to keep pace with Kyriacos Athanasiou, the new distinguished professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Athanasiou has authored or co-authored some 225 peer-reviewed papers (in 2009 alone, his name appears as principal investigator on 18.) He is a co-founder of five biomedical engineering companies, including one that was sold for $75 million in 2006. He has 28 issued and pending patents; holds two adjunct professorships at the University of Texas; and in October, will take over as editor-in-chief of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, the flagship publication for his profession.

Now Athanasiou, 49, is champing at the bit to bring the achievements of his new department to the attention of the world.

“If you look at what we’re doing in the department, we’re rocking the world here. And people don’t know about us,” he said. “There is this dichotomy, this gap, between people’s perception of us and the top-tier research of our outstanding faculty and students.”

Ask Athanasiou why he left his previous position as the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University in Houston to come to Davis, and you begin to understand what motivates him.

“I came here because of promise. Rice is an exceptional place, but it has reached a steady state. I like to effect change. I like things with a delta,” he said, referring to the Greek letter that serves as a mathematical symbol indicating a change in value. “Here there is a tremendous opportunity to build, to extend, to expand and to bring our visibility up.”

As a seasoned entrepreneur, Athanasiou sees great opportunity in the “highly inventive, highly translational research” that many in his department are conducting. He’s already scheduled meetings to discuss the business possibilities of this research with an old colleague from Rice, the new dean of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, Steve Currall. And he plans to forge ties between the department and the campus’s technology transfer office.

Continued here