Abstract
Having spent the majority of her professional career in the United States, Semahat Demir now embarks on a new adventurea return to the country she left 23 years ago to lead Istanbul Kültür University (IKU), Turkey. She has built legacies in academia, industry, government, and science diplomacy through more than 130 journal publications in computational bioengineering, her work building a multiscale modeling funding program and directing US$290 million in annual grant funding for 200 projects at the National Science Foundation (NSF), her career-long dedication to providing opportunities for women engineers, and most recently her efforts to foster collaborative research efforts between the United States and Turkey. With her return home, she completes a circle, reverses her diaspora, and at the same time becomes a larger part of an effort to bring science to the global community.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 6378566 |
| Pages (from-to) | 26-31 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | IEEE pulse |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2012 |
Funding
In addition to shaping the direction of BME research at the NSF, Demir brought with her a passion for mentoring that she developed while a professor, having guided 42 students through various research programs. At the NSF, Demir turned her attention toward nurturing early-career scientists funded by the foundation. “She’s a person with a big heart for junior investigators,” says Kaiming Ye. Demir often gave lectures on preparing grant applications and navigating the NSF’s funding process, and she facilitated mentorships between junior and senior investigators. “I had this written strategy for my BME program to be a launching pad for new investigators,” she says. Demir is proud that her guidance has enabled many new researchers to gain full professorships and that some have gone on to obtain NIH funding for clinical research. Demir also left her mark in another area— the Interagency Opportunities in Multiscale Modeling in Biomedical, Biological, and Behav-ioral Systems—a multiscale modeling research funding program that she built from the ground up. Working collaboratively with 18 U.S. gov-ernment research organizations, she amassed US$20 million in funding and established 24 grants for this joint program of the NSF, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Energy. As evidence of the program’s success, just four years after it began, the NIH initiated a Research Project Grant (R01) for multiscale modeling research—a step that advanced the research into the realm of applied science. In 2011, the NIH took the endeavor one step further, establishing a multiscale modeling program for clinical research. “It’s so important to push the frontiers of discovery through basic science,” says Demir. “And then to find partners or stakeholders such as the NIH that can sustain and further nurture those activities.” As a funding administrator, Demir feels fortunate to have had a front row seat to watch new BME research avenues emerge and grow. One such project is a multiinstitution, NSF Science and Technology Center led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with coinvestigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, called Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems. The goal of the collaborative effort is to develop biological machines—human-engineered multicellular biological systems that can replace failed or diseased systems in the body and can exhibit emergent behavior. Other important BME projects that Demir supported while an administrator are regenerative medicine and brain–computer interface technology for the development of brain-controlled prosthetics.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Science Foundation | |
| National Institutes of Health | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration |