Friday, December 8, 2023

Medical device research and innovation leads to prominent endowment for professor

Medical device research and innovation leads to prominent endowment for professor

NOVEMBER 24, 2020 — Teja Guda, associate professor in the UTSA College of Engineering’s biomedical engineering and chemical engineering departments, has been named the Jacobson Distinguished Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The $500,000 endowment was established in 2013, with a goal of promoting innovation and technology entrepreneurship at the university.

The endowed professorship will help Guda and students under him continue their work on new medical device therapies with physicians, researchers and scientists, as well as collaborators at the UT Health Medical Center, Southwest Research Institute, Texas Biomedical Research Institute, and in the military and biomedical industries. Both undergraduate and graduate students will be working with Guda to develop devices and regenerative medicine therapies for clinical and translational use.


“He has been working to promote innovative research, student success and entrepreneurial training since he began as a faculty member at UTSA.”



“I was delighted, grateful and motivated when I was named to the Jacobson Distinguished Professorship of Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” said Guda. “Delighted for the honor and recognition; grateful to Norm Jacobson for the endowment to promote faculty and student innovation and supporting bold, forward-facing and translational initiatives; and motivated by the opportunities this presented to support new training and opportunities for the amazing students at UTSA and advance cutting-edge ideas.”

Guda said that whether it is through supporting students through developing an internship program, or now starting a new graduate program in biomedical technology commercialization, the idea has always been to develop innovative and transformative research projects, provide students with opportunities to cut their teeth on these projects, and then to establish a translational pipeline so that these projects turn into commercialized products and devices that benefit society at large.

“I believe this endowment allows me to continue this work and build further opportunities for students that transcend individual departments, promote even more team-based innovation with scientists, physicians, researchers and UTSA students, and to bridge these translational and transformative projects with the biomedical industries that would benefit the community,” he said.

“Dr. Guda is the perfect choice for the Jacobson Distinguished Professorship of Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” said JoAnn Browning, dean of the College of Engineering. “He has been working to promote innovative research, student success and entrepreneurial training since he began as a faculty member at UTSA. I cannot imagine a better candidate to receive this endowed professorship.”

In addition to his faculty position, Guda was selected in 2019 as director of a new College of Engineering (COE) graduate program in biomedical technology commercialization. And, for the past six years, he has held the position of assistant director with the National Science Foundation-supported Center for Innovation Technology and Entrepreneurship (CITE). These roles put Guda in a unique position to provide entrepreneurial training to students across UTSA, giving them the chance to get an idea of the work involved in starting up technology companies and taking their ideas to the marketplace.

“The training provided through CITE has resulted in better career outcomes for students, whether it be in industry, graduate school, professional degrees or their own small businesses once they graduate—a true classroom-to-career experience,” Guda said. “This work is going to be further enhanced working with the amazing Maker Space that the College of Engineering has set up within the new Science and Engineering Building. There, student teams can truly prototype designs and test and develop concepts easily on campus in a way that wasn’t quite possible before.”

Guda earned his doctoral degree in biomedical engineering from UTSA in 2008. He joined the COE faculty in 2011 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and has risen in the ranks, being promoted to associate professor with tenure this fall.

In 2019, Guda was awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in the amount of $530,688 for his project, Programming Vascularization by Design in Porous Composites. The goal of the project is to generate new discoveries about how blood vessels grow. This year, Guda was named a Young Innovator by the journal Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering.

Guda’s current research is focused on developing regenerative strategies for bone and skeletal muscle tissue engineering. Guda has authored or co-authored more than 50 published reference articles, 140 conference abstracts, and six book chapters. Additionally, Guda’s work has produced multiple invention disclosures and patent filings as well as the edited book, Translating Biomaterials for Bone Grafts.

Guda has taught courses in tissue mechanics, technology and product development, and medical device design. In 2018, he received the Richard S. Howe Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award at UTSA for his development of signature learning experiences for undergraduates that included creative applied or experiential learning beyond the traditional classroom environment.


EXPLORE FURTHER

In addition to his teaching and research, Guda has given more than 25 invited lectures at national and international meetings, served as a manuscript reviewer for several biomedical engineering-related scientific journals, and continues to serve as a grant reviewer for numerous funding agencies. He has been an active member of multiple professional societies including the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Society, the Society for Biomaterials, and the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Endowed academic positions like the Jacobson Distinguished Professorship of Innovation and Entrepreneurship are used to foster excellence in research and scholarly activities, and are crucial to the university's efforts to recruit and retain highly qualified researchers. Endowments help create a legacy with UTSA in perpetuity that will benefit generations of faculty, students, and scholars for years to come.

Bruce Forey



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