Rong Zhu Gan, Charles E. Foster Chair and professor, sits with a model of a human ear in her office in Felgar Hall Friday. The model was created by Gan and other workers in the department as part of hearing research. Merrill Jones/The Daily

Bioengineering professor Rong Gan has spent the last week pouring over the contents of her office desk in Felgar Hall. With deliberately organized mounds of papers and official documents surrounding her, it’s crunch time to apply for a grant to help fund her research.

Applying for grants and awards is part of a day in the life of a faculty member working in OU’s bioengineering program. Without them, the program wouldn’t even exist.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the department winning a $1 million grant from the prestigious Whitaker Foundation in Washington, D.C. OU matched those funds, and established the bioengineering program in the department of engineering.

Other professors in the bioengineering program Edgar O’Rear and Harold Stalford helped push through the Whitaker grant.

“We had an excellent team put together here,” O’Rear said. “We had experts who were national leaders helping us build the program.”

Since the interdisciplinary program began in spring 1999, it has expanded quickly. In 2003, the OU Board of Regents approved the establishment of master’s and Ph.D. programs. Between 2003 to 2008, budget expenditures increased 30 percent.

High-tech bio-tech

Bioengineering does not offer an undergraduate degree, and it is not an independent department but an interdisciplinary program affiliated with the three schools of the College of Engineering.

The range of their research is as diverse as the curriculum, with projects in medicine, food and nanotechnology.

For example, Gan said she and her students research biomechanics of soft tissue in the human ear. To do this, they build 3-D computer models, a technique that she said is on the vanguard of technology around the world.

“We want to improve the model to understand the human ear, both healthy and pathological functions,” said Gan’s student Fan Yang, mechanical engineering graduate student. After she completes her Ph.D., Yang said she plans to continue in the field of research, because “four to five years isn’t enough to finish this work.”

Stalford’s research focuses on using nanotechnology to separate DNA from a cell. He compared it to using a miniature blender the size of a red blood cell to split cells and analyze DNA.

O’Rear, the program’s director, and other members of the bioengineering faculty have developed a method that can break up an artery-clogging blood clot in seven minutes, compared to the currently used methods that can take up to 70 minutes.

Focus on students

Also, the bioengineering program recently started a partnership which pays students to work in local biotechnology start-ups.

“This is a ‘win-win’ situation,” O’Rear said. “Our students will learn how to function in the corporate environment while the entrepreneurial companies will receive valuable technical assistance that can help them succeed.”

While the bioengineering program is young, it already has alumni making names for themselves in the biotechnology field.

“It was a wonderful experience in the past four years when I had studied bioengineering at OU,” Chenkai Dai, now a research fellow at Johns Hopkins University, said in an e-mail. “I love those courses and the projects. The research projects in Biomedical Engineering Lab lead by Dr. Gan really guided me into a biomedical world.”