The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation awarded U.Va. BME $10M in 2011 to endow the Translational Research Partnership Program in Biomedical Engineering. The funds were matched by the University to create a $20M endowment to support Translational Research. The task facing the department is twofold: support research projects that are explicitly translational in nature, and in the process, test and validate models of translational research that can be widely adopted As U.Va.’s Coulter Project Director, David Chen is the primary resource for the University and the Coulter Foundation’s efforts to enable and lead an innovative translational research process. In addition to managing the U.Va.-Coulter Partnership, David oversees identification and development of translational research projects in the U.Va. School of Medicine. The U.Va.-Coulter Partnership supports $700K in projects each year. The translational nature of these projects is reinforced by requiring that they be led jointly by investigators from the BME department and U.Va. clinical practitioners. Over the last 10 years projects have resulted in 14 startups, 10 licenses to industry, and over $40M in NIH funding. In addition to David’s responsibilities with Coulter he also instructs BME Advanced Design, mentors student design projects, and leads the School of Medicine program “Medical Innovation and Human Centered Design."