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People
Coulter Project Director | Coulter Program Primary Investigator | Oversight Committee | Participating U. Va. Faculty Coulter Project Primary Investigator
Thomas C. Skalak is Vice President for Research and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He served as Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UVa from 2001-2008. He received the B.E.S. in Bioengineering from The Johns Hopkins University in 1979 and the Ph.D. in Bioengineering from U.C.S.D. in 1984. Dr. Skalak is President of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), which represents over 50,000 professionals, and a past-President of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). In AIMBE, he has served on the Finance and Development Committee and chaired the Fellows Selection Committee. As Vice President for Research at UVa, Tom is responsible for the integration and enhancement of scholarship, research, and commercialization activities across UVa’s eleven schools, multiple research centers, and external partners. He is leading university-wide strategic programs, including multidisciplinary groups in environmental sustainability, innovation, and systems bioscience. He led the launch of the university-wide OpenGrounds initiative, designed to create places and programs that inspire creative innovation at the intersection of technology, science, the arts, and humanities; the Science & Art Project, bringing 300 faculty and community members together for cross-boundary collaborations; the UVa Venture Summit, which brings over $10 billion in active venture capital to UVa each year to discuss windows on the future of emerging fields; and the UVa Bay Game, an interactive computer simulation game that predicts behaviors of the nation’s largest estuary and watershed in relation to the human communities, agricultural and fisheries practices, and land development policies that surround it. The university’s goal is to integrate the unique resources of a comprehensive research and learning organization to explore, discover, and invent, bringing diverse talents and approaches to bear on major societal problems and producing innovation that drives the creative economy. Dr. Skalak is a recognized expert in complex system modeling, biomechanics, and blood vessel growth, and is a distinguished educator, having designed, implemented, and taught in a top-rated undergraduate bioengineering program emphasizing hands-on experiential learning in laboratories, design teams, and corporate internships. Novel technical approaches include multicellular computer simulations that can predict complex system pattern formation in living systems. He has given more than 100 invited talks on innovation and bioengineering throughout the world to industrial partners, academic groups, and government agencies including the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Competitiveness, and has delivered short courses on blood properties for R&D groups at corporate clients such as Abbott Laboratories. He has been a consultant to major device and pharmaceutical firms, as well as several start-up ventures, including Abbott Laboratories, Medtronic, and Target Therapeutics. Tom currently directs the UVa-Coulter Foundation Translational Research Partnership and a co-managed fund with Johnson & Johnson that link faculty and students in engineering, bioscience, and business with the aim of delivering new products to clinical use and commercialization. He is Program Director of the world’s largest bioengineering network, BMEplanet, with support of the NSF Partnerships for Innovation program and the Kauffman Foundation, connecting bioengineers in 45 countries spanning 6 continents. He has served as reviewer for NIH, NSF, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Science Foundation Ireland, IIE Whitaker International Fellows Program, and more than 30 scientific journals. |
