Beacon Alliance: Connecting Connecticut to the region and the world

BEACON is an acronym for the Biomedical Engineering Alliance and Consortium. The Hartford-based nonprofit organization group is dedicated to bringing together diverse resources from academic institutions, medical facilities and corporations to facilitate collaborative research, industrial partnering and the development of new incubating companies. The BEACON network presently consists of an impressive array of academic institutions, including Trinity College, The University of Connecticut, The University of Connecticut Healthcare Center, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, The University of Hartford, The University of Stuttgart, and the University of Frieberg Medical School, medical institutions such as Hartford Hospital, The University of Connecticut Health Center's John Dempsey Hospital, and Bay State Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts and major corporations including General Electric, Pfizer, Boston Scientific, TYCO/Kendall Health Care, Court Square Data Group and a significant number of law and business firms including McCormick, Paulding & Huber, UBS Paine Webber, Pepe & Hazard, and Pullman & Comley, as well as over 30 incubating companies. (For details visit the BEACON website at www.beaconalliance.org).

President of BEACON is Dr. Joseph D. Bronzino, the well knowen educator, author, editor, and entrepreneur with an extensive background in engineering. Dr. Bronzino edited the Biomedical Engineering Handbook, published by CRC Press.

BEACON is an umbrella organization with three main components: BEACON, the parent company; the Beacon Technology Network, a for-profit subsidiary of BEACON which was established to assist incubating companies, and the soon-to-be established BEACON Foundation, which will be designed to fund research at BEACON's member institutions. In BEACON's mission statement, the organization "pledges to facilitate collaborative exchange and research among its industrial, clinical, and academic partners...to foster an environment that optimizes the development and delivery of commercially viable innovations in biomedical science and engineering for healthcare applications." Simply put, BEACON brings together educational institutions, corporations, and industry for the common goals of training new experts in the field and developing innovative healthcare technologies.

"Biomedical engineering is the core of our activity," Bronzino said in a recent interview at BEACON's suite of offices, in the south end of Hartford. Pointing to a huge tome called the Biomedical Engineering Handbook - which Bronzino edited - which illustrates that Biomedical Engineering professionals are very much involved in a wide range of approaches to apply new technologies in the medical/clinical environment.

BEACON came about some six years ago, when Dr. Bronzino approached the presidents of Trinity College, the University of Hartford, and the University of Connecticut Health Center with a plan. Each of these institution offered bioengineering programs. The programs were combined into one major program. With a committee initially representing Trinity, The University of Hartford, The University of Connecticut, Hartford Hospital, John Dempsey Hospital, Yale New Haven Hospital, and Baystate Medical Center, BEACON was born. The new organization received a $1 million grant from the Whitaker Foundation, which supports bioengineering initiatives. That was matched with another $1 million from BEACON's participating institutions to help launch the enterprise.

BEACON early on established three major goals:

• To integrate the various biomedical engineering programs at the member institutions, so students at one institution could take courses at the others at no charge.
• Hiring four new biomedical engineering faculty members to increase the area of expertise in biomechanics and bioinstrumentation in the region of Greater Hartford.
• To facilitate "technology transfer".

BEACON expanded its activities to a global level in its third year. The organization was approached by a group of schools in Germany that wanted to emulate BEACON. As a result, BEACON set up an alliance in Germany that followed the same curriculum as the stateside consortium. In this way, the German students can join the educational program in USA in the fall of their junior year, and, vice-versa, the American students can go to Germany in the spring of their junior year and not miss a beat, because the courses are the same.

At the end of the Whitaker support in January 2000, BEACON had accomplished its initial set of goals. Since then, BEACON has been pursuing its role as a "facilitator, encourager, stimulator" to encourage collaborative work, stimulate industrial partnerships, and facilitate the development of new companies. BEACON provides preferential access for its members who request access to the resources within BEACON, and makes all of the connections and set up. BEACON is presently opening satellite operations in Massachusetts along the so-called "Knowledge Corridor," a regional interstate cooperative zone that stretches essentially from Northampton, Massachusetts, to New Haven, Connecticut. Bronzino's vision for the future of BEACON encompasses locations in Springfield, Hartford, and New Haven, with people in those centers interacting in a very elastic manner to develop collaborative partnerships as well as new products and create jobs.