For the second year in a row, the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department in the School of Medicine and School of Engineering, ranked fourth in the nation in the amount of funding it received from the National Institutes of Health.

The BME department brought in $4,859,502 in NIH grant funding in 2017, up more than $500,000 from the previous year. The increase was due in large part to a pair of substantial grants that went to department chair Jianyi ‘Jay’ Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., and vice chair and professor Gangjian ‘GQ’ Qin, M.D.

“As a department, we now have 11 NIH R01 and one U01 grants.” said Zhang, who also holds the Michael and Gillian Welch Endowed Chair of Engineering Leadership. “The department’s receipt of NIH funds in 2017 was largely the result of BME faculty winning new NIH R01 grants.”

The rankings are published by the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research, which lists all NIH funding for U.S. medical schools. The joint BME departments of Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Oregon Health & Science University, ranked first, second, and third, respectively. The UAB BME Department is a joint department in the UAB Schools of Engineering and Medicine.