The University of Wisconsin biomedical engineering department was awarded the Wallace H. Coulter Foundations Translational Research Partnership Award in Biomedical Engineering, officials announced Monday.

Funding from this grant amounts to $580,000 annually for the next five years, and is to be distributed to translational biomedical engineering projects around the UW campus.

Professor Robert Radwin, chair of the biomedical engineering department and principal investigator of the grant proposal, said he is proud the UW biomedical engineering department has received such an honor.

"We're all excited about being selected and we wanted to tell the world," Radwin said.

According to Radwin, only nine universities were selected to receive this funding, and UW was one of them.

"I don't know how many [universities] actually applied, but there's more than 80 biomedical engineering programs in the United States and North America," Radwin said. "And we're one of only nine that have been awarded this grant."

Radwin said there are a variety of organizations and programs within UW's biomedical engineering department that would benefit from this funding. He said the funding is meant to go directly to translational research, or patient-based research which seeks to apply scientific findings to actual medical treatments, adding there are many programs that conduct this research on campus.

"There's a vast number of organizations on the UW campus that exist to support translational biomedical engineering research, such as Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, that will allow research to move quickly from the laboratory to the patient, which is what the objective of this grant is all about," Radwin said.

According to Radwin, there was a scheduled "kick-off meeting" in Miami that had to be rescheduled due to Hurricane Wilma, however he says after the meeting, UW will have a better idea as to which programs and which projects will be receiving the grant money.

Naomi Chesler, an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department, conducts research on "vascular remodeling," which she said is relevant to pulmonary and systemic hypertension diseases.

"When you have hypertension, or high blood pressure, your large arteries get stiffer and that makes it harder for your heart to pump," Chesler said. "So we're trying to understand how that progresses and what treatments might be most effective."

Chesler said she plans to submit a proposal to receive funding from the recently awarded grant for her research.

"The project that I'm planning to submit to be funded would involve trying to improve the specificity of diagnoses for people with pulmonary hypertension so that treatments can be better targeted toward the particulars of their disease," Chesler said.

Chesler shared Radwin's enthusiasm for the award, and said it will be a great opportunity for the biomedical department to make "contributions to patient care and work to get their research findings to patients."

The nature of this organization's grant, as it pertains to translational programs, is a great way to support biomedical engineering researchers trying to get their research out to the people who need it most, Chesler added.

"Basic science is great, but when we can translate our findings to patients, that's when we really make a difference," Chesler said.