RENU
In January 2025, I went out for a beer with Eric Perrault, the Vice President for Research at Northwestern University. I knew Eric from about a hundred years ago, when I was an Associate Dean at the Graduate School at Northwestern and he was the Director of Graduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering. Way back then, Eric had developed a homegrown way to track and evaluate PhD student progress – something (for some, okay, for many reasons) historically really hard to do. I loved Eric’s new system and we ended up scaling it to be used for all PhD students at NU, a system still in use twenty years later – the Graduate Student Tracking System (GSTS). So we are at Sketchbook, a great microbrewery in Evanston and Skokie, and I was telling Eric about some work I’d done with Corners, a research center at Northwestern that uses network science to understand and prevent gun violence.
Their awesome director Andy Pappachristos had already reached out to Eric and let him know about our Origin Engagement and the good work we’d done to clarify the Corners story and help them develop some presentation materials for donor and civic engagement. Eric came ready with three ideas for how we might partner. We agreed to do all of them.
One of these three was a project to help enable the expansion of the Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering (CARE), a research center in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences run by Professor Guillermo Ameer (effectively an extension of his own lab) to the new Institute for Regenerative Engineering at Northwestern University (RENU). This expansion was enabled by a significant gift from the Simpson-Querry family, who have given significant resources to support biomedical research at Northwestern. I also knew Guillermo from my time at Northwestern, not from the lab, office, or the classroom. The basketball court. We played in a regular Wednesday and Friday morning game together. I’ve often said I learned more about how universities work by playing basketball than by doing my job. So, I was excited about this opportunity.
Our first step was to clarify the differences between the ambitions of the center with that of the new institute. We did a “speed dating” version of the Origin Engagement – a good riff on our evolving process – working not with a team but with Guillermo to determine the key features of the core story – what they do, why it matters, how it is different. We came up with three words that identify and specify the institute: restore, augment, preserve. We then worked with them to build a deck for presentation to the donors to motivate and secure their ultimate investment in this new enterprise.
With the clarity achieved and investment secured, we worked together – with the VPR’s marketing team and the University Global Marketing and Communication team – to design, build, and launch a new institute website. We worked quickly on this project, as it was critical to launch this new site in advance of the institute announcement and space “ribbon cutting” in April. We succeeded. We also developed scripts for launch videos and coached Guillermo on his presentation skills and message discipline for the new institute (especially relative to his center).
Coincident with and subsequent to this launch, we also socialized the positioning and ambitions of the new institute with faculty across schools (Medicine, Engineering, and Arts & Sciences), building a coalition of faculty to be part of the new executive team. We facilitated a planning retreat in August that gave engineers and clinicians an opportunity to brainstorm ideas for collaboration. We did another kind of speed dating at this retreat, where we had “stations” of clinicians set up in a room (ophthalmologists, neurologists, transplant surgeons, dermatologists) and the engineers (chemical and biological, biomedical, electrical, materials) circulated among the stations and brainstormed possible collaborations. The inaugural seed grants of RENU were distributed to proposals that arose from this retreat.
This past fall and through Q4, we drafted and finalized the three-year strategic plan for RENU. In December, we created two new presentation decks for RENU, one for presentation to the donors and one for the Board of Trustees of Northwestern. These decks articulated the successes of the year and set the ambitions of the institute for the years ahead.
The work of RENU and its faculty is kind of miraculous. They are doing incredible work. As their website says, “Regenerative engineering is an exciting new field defined as the convergence of advances in materials science and engineering, stem cell and developmental biology, physical sciences, and clinical translation to develop scalable and reliable tools that enable the regeneration or reconstruction of complex tissues and organs. It can be thought of as a field that aims to enable the implementation of regenerative medicine for all. The Querrey Simpson Institute for Regenerative Engineering at Northwestern University (QSI RENU) will lead the charge to develop and translate transformative technologies that will empower our body to heal.” It was awesome working with colleagues old and new to bring this language to life and to light.