A new chair has been appointed to head the Harrington Department of Bioengineering.
The school announced William Ditto, a researcher and entrepreneur, was named chair of the Bioengineering department on Friday, although he accepted the job about 2 weeks ago.
Bioengineering students in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering will be able to be involved with more hands-on research through entrepreneurial projects in biotechnology and bioengineering beginning in March 2009.
Ditto plans to integrate entrepreneuralism and innovation into the bioengineering program so that students can put their ideas into action.
“I think it’s very important to move from the labs and into the marketplace with our inventions and discoveries,” Ditto said. “We need to learn ways to get out the door quicker, which I hope to teach to our next generation.”
Ditto was the founding chair of the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida.
Before working for the University of Florida, Ditto researched for the U.S. Navy and the engineering departments at Emory University and Georgia Tech.
Paul Johnson, the executive dean of the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, said that through Ditto’s work and research, Georgia Techs’ Bioengineering program has been ranked in the top five in the country.
Johnson said Ditto is someone who likes to build programs.
“The Harrington Department of Bioengineering would like to become one of the top biomedical programs in the country,” Johnson said. “With William Ditto, this is obtainable because we see a lot of qualities in him that we would like to see in the department, like innovation and entrepreneur experience.”
Johnson said Ditto’s strong record of building relationships with the medical community is important as well.
Ditto has focused his work and research on cardiac control, the development of therapies and devices for controlling epilepsy and the imaging of cardiac arrhythmia.
He has founded three companies through his research: Control Dynamics, a consulting company that commercialized some of his inventions to control cardiac problems; ChaoLogix, a company that uses reconfigurable computer chips that can change their size depending on what activity the person is doing, optimizing the experience; and ChronoBionics, which uses electrical stimulation of the brain to work with epilepsy, depression and pain management.
Ditto’s work and research have been recognized by various publications such as Industry Week, Time Magazine, the Washington Post and organizations like the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.
He said the reason he took the job at ASU is because he sees ASU as the future.
“It is becoming the University that other universities strive to become,” Ditto said. “It is not just in engineering but in every department of the school, and the staff is very dynamic.”
Reach the reporter at allison.carlin@asu.edu.
