 One of the things when I was looking at my first faculty position is where could I go to learn how to be the best faculty member and researcher and teacher I could possibly be, and Purdue really met all of those things. I admired all of the other schools of engineering at Purdue, some of which had been in existence for a hundred years because they had such scope and scale and tremendous alumni and great research and thinking if we could achieve that in biomedical engineering we would really have something special that would impact students and their careers but lots of patients who are in need of these medical technologies. I'm very very pleased to be part of this celebration of George Wotica. He's had an extraordinary impact on biomedical engineering here at Purdue. I remember quite vividly in 2001 I was in a meeting in Huvde Hall and Dean Schwartz and George Wotica told me about the Whitaker Foundation that was giving grants to universities that wanted to start biomedical engineering programs because all of the advances in modern biology when coupled with engineering could have an enormous impact on health and on understanding of disease. All of a sudden in 2004 we had the resources to build a brand new building and of course at that point the ball was fully in the court of George Wotica who was the head of the new school. Within a few years we sort of went from a fledgling department until a full fledged school with its own facility and as part of the faculty growth we could then offer an undergraduate program as well as everybody into graduate school. He knew how to build the program. Today Purdue biomedical engineering is one of the top programs in the country. One of our earliest wins was our ability to attract truly high quality and dedicated staff and faculty and students to our operation. I really was inspired to see how you can persist and focus on solving a problem and sticking with it for a long time for it to ultimately become something that's used clinically. How many patients have been directly helped through the technologies that we've invented or developed? If you actually look over the past 25 years that number is I think approaching around 10 million patients worldwide that reflects literally a patient being helped just about every minute of every day from something that we've developed here. Biomedical engineering is moving us from a reactive way of either gathering data about a patient or helping that patient to one that is continuous and preventative. What you did over such an extended period of time has very few replicas that I'm aware of in Purdue history or anybody's history. On behalf of the Weldon School we'd like to present to you now the George R. Wattica Atrium of Biomedical Engineering. We're at the ground floor and you're moving from like a small shell space and building somewhere else on campus to casting a vision to getting the folks to building a program. Getting it off the ground is just a perculean task and I think that's what his legacy will be.