GE Healthcare and UWM team up to create talent pipeline

MILWAUKEE -- In an effort to improve medical imaging software, GE Healthcare is giving UW-Milwaukee $3 million to create its own talent pipeline. The money will go towards research and developing an advanced-level curriculum in specialized software technology.

"I am really proud of the fact the GE Healthcare is investing in our university in a way that will build talent for them, technology for them, but also really benefit our students and faculty," UWM Chancellor Michael Lovell said.

The grant is intended to help teach students how to improve the quality of images from medical equipment such as CT scans and X-rays.

"This has advanced year-by-year on taking that data and making it more understandable to a physician and allowing them to get a clear diagnosis of what may be going on in a person before they ever touch them," Bill Berezowitz from GE Healthcare said.

The collaboration will also provide continuing education opportunities for GE Healthcare engineers. This will provide UWM engineering students with very specific skills which will help them get jobs, while giving GE a competitive edge and potential future employees.

"There`s really not a lot of people in the country that have a skill set in this area, so students that go through this program will really have a leg up working with GE Healthcare, but also many other companies that are interested in similar areas," Lovell said.

UWM will begin offering a graduate-level certificate in computational imaging in the fall of 2013.

The GE Healthcare Center for Advanced Computational Imaging will be located on UWM's new Innovation Campus in Wauwatosa.

Ground will be broken for the first building on this campus within days.