Partner Stories
Innovation: The Hartwell Foundation
Synchronized MRI and drug therapy for pediatric brain tumors, “knifeless”
surgery on the developing fetal heart, and an internally implanted
device for the growth of the gastrointestinal track… What do these
projects have in common? No, they aren’t science fiction; they are
research projects supported by The Hartwell Foundation. For the third
straight year, The
Hartwell Foundation has named the University of
Michigan as one of the country’s Top 10 Centers of Excellence. As a
result, several U-M
faculty members have been named Hartwell Investigators,
and several postdoctoral researchers have been awarded Hartwell Fellowships.
The Foundation is supporting innovative and cutting-edge biomedical
applied research with the potential to benefit children.
Innovation: W. M. Keck Foundation
The W. M. Keck Foundation in Los Angeles supports high-risk, high-potential
projects in the sciences, and the University of Michigan is very proud
to be a recipient of numerous Keck grants over the years. One recent
project supported by the Foundation was a collaboration between the
College of Engineering, School of Public Health, Medical School, and
the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Faculty from these
schools are exploring nano- and microscale transport in the cell in
order to create new mathematical models of cellular health and disease.
Predictive models may be generalized to tissues, organs, organ systems,
and, perhaps even entire organisms. This work is extremely important
for developing the earliest possible detection of human disease.