Getting Involved
We appreciate your gift, and we will make good use of it!
The BME Department is making important contributions through our research, education and entrepreneurship. Our activities and initiatives are fueled in part by state funding, but we are increasingly dependent on generous gifts from alumni, friends and corporate partners to fulfill key department priorities, such as undergraduate and graduate student scholarships, fellowships, and internships. No gift is too small, and we will use every penny of your contribution toward providing experiences for our students that are only possible with your support. Thank you!
Featured Funds
When you click on the "Give Now" link and designate your funds to Biomedical Engineering, you are supporting all of these initiatives which positively impact the department's mission in teaching, research, and service. If you wish to designate a specific featured fund that you would like to support, please make a note of this in the "In Honor of" section when you click on the "Give Now" button.
Help us recruit diverse, exceptional PhD students. These fellowships will support fall-semester research rotations for our brand new PhD students who may not yet be ready to match directly to a lab as soon as they join the program. Spending a few weeks in a handful of labs throughout the first semester will give new students the chance to learn more about the research in different labs before they commit to joining one lab for their PhD training.
Students in our BME Masters of Engineering Program pay for their own tuition, and these fellowships will be given to students based on need and merit to offset their tuition expenses.
Many BME undergraduate students take advantage of the opportunity to do research in BME laboratories, but conducting research requires the purchase of supplies. Typically, the funding for lab supplies is provided by research grants given to the labs; however, undergraduate students often work on new, cutting-edge projects for which grant funding doesn't yet exist in the lab. Donated funds will support the purchase supplies for unfunded research, enabling undergraduate students to conduct mentored research on brand new projects.
Undergraduate students and graduate students frequently have the opportunity to travel to multi-day conferences to present their biomedical engineering research, to learn about emerging topics in BME, and to build their own professional networks. However, conference travel is expensive -- conference registration for students can cost a few hundred dollars, travel to the conference (depending on the location of the conference) can cost hundreds of dollars, and hotel rooms are increasingly expensive. Donated funds will help support travel for BME students to science and engineering conferences.
Undergraduate students and graduate students in BME are eligible to apply to the BME Department for funding to support their participation in a summer internship at a company anywhere in the world. This funding is provided through the BME Department's Coulter Translational Research Center. However, the number of BME students wanting to participate in internships each summer far outnumbers the amount of funding available. Donated funds will support summer internships at companies for undergraduate and graduate students and help meet the growing demand for this important and typically transformative student experience.
This may seem hard to believe, but the BME Department at UVA is one of the few BME departments in the country that does not have its own endowed professorship. Donated funds will support the establishment of our first-ever endowed professorship in BME. How does having an endowed professorship help the BME Department? By paying for the salary of one of our professors, the Department can spend the savings (from not having to pay that salary) on new initiatives that elevate and transform the student experience.