The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University will celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of its namesake with a presentation of recent collaborations by physicians at Emory and engineers at Georgia Tech. The symposium, "Georgia Tech and Emory, Engineering Solutions for Unmet Clinical Needs" takes place Friday, Dec. 6 from 2-4 p.m. in the Rollins Auditorium of the new Health Sciences Research Building on Gatewood Road, with a reception to follow. The Emory community is invited to attend.
Wallace H. Coulter, legendary scientist and inventor of the Coulter Counter, a device that transformed diagnostics in hospitals by allowing rapid counting of blood cells, studied engineering at Georgia Tech in the early 1930s. The invention was the foundation for the successful, multi-national Coulter Corporation. In October 1997, the Coulter Corporation was acquired by Beckman Instruments, Inc., and the company is now known as Beckman Coulter, Inc. The Coulter Foundation, through its philanthropy, helped establish the innovative academic department operated jointly by Georgia Tech and Emory University.
"Wallace Coulter firmly believed that technology and engineering can change medicine for the better, and that is entirely our focus," says Ravi Bellamkonda, chair of the joint Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.