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There was established in 1986 a joint Seagram program between Georgia Tech
and Emory University School of Medicine which provided funds for collaboration
between faculty at the two institutions,
and that really got us going.
It was important in my thinking about whether to come here or not.
Another important event was really
the establishment of the joint department of biomedical engineering
between Georgia Tech and Emory when Mike Jones came to Emory to be the Executive
Vice President for Health Sciences,
he wanted Emory to be involved in biomedical engineering.
We all agreed that the right person
to head that up would be to recruit Don Giddens back from Johns Hopkins
to Georgia Tech. Don arrived in June 1997,
chaired a committee that made recommendations,
and three months later, September 1997,
the Board of Regents had approved the establishment of a new joint department
and the Board of Trustees at Emory haad established a new joint--
had approved the establishment of a new joint department, all in three months.
That doesn't very often happen in academia, that things move that fast.
And certainly the generosity of Pete Petit,
the awards we got from the Whitaker Foundation in 1993 and I think the
second one was 2000,
and the Coulter foundation,
providing their money, that's all contributed to
what has been, by any academic measure,
a very rapid increase
in bioengineering, its recognition nationally, internationally,
and to being, at least in terms the US World--
US News and World Report, the second-ranked department in the country.
But my bias would say we're right up there at the top in
terms of applying engineering principles to improve human health.
What attracted me to come here
1987 was
the very entrepreneurial attitude. I still remember being told, as part of the
recruiting process,
I think it was probably by Tom Stelson, who was then the Vice President for
Research,
"Bob you have to understand: Georgia Tech
is what it is and is going to become what it's going to become,
not because the state of Georgia wants it to be that good,
but because the faculty, the administration,
and the alumni want it to be that good. Bob's personal
qualities, I think, are probably number one
is, he's really a people person. He can remember
names, life stories, where this person went to school,
they've moved from the school to that school, as far as faculty colleagues
from whenever ago. Those kinds of things are not forgotten.
And Bob has these rules of life on the planet Earth
that he created. He's always "the cup of coffee cup is always half full,"
most positive person I know, I've learned quite a bit of that.
And the rule that the hardest for me is,
if there's ever a situation or an incident
that is just awful and terrible and you don't know what to do,
place the least dramatic interpretation
on whatever has happened or whatever has been said,
and, you know, figure it all out and
doesn't feel so bad at all.