Key takeaways
- A $1 million gift from Samaritan Biologics and its co-founders established a new endowed professorship in UF Biomedical Engineering.
- The professorship recognizes excellence in research, education, mentorship, leadership and service.
- Wesley E. Bolch, Ph.D., has been named the inaugural recipient.
Thanks to a $1 million gift from Samaritan Biologics and its co-founders, Distinguished Professor Wesley E. Bolch, Ph.D., has been named the inaugural Chang & Szalay Samaritan Biologics Endowed Professor in Biomedical Engineering.
“It is with great pride and honor that I accept this appointment as the inaugural recipient of the Chang & Szalay Samaritan Biologics Endowed Professorship,” said Bolch, a longtime UF professor of biomedical engineering and medical physics. “I very much look forward to using this professorship to further my endeavors in teaching, research and service.”
The endowment was established by Samaritan Biologics co-founders Jerry Chang, David Szalay and Virginia “Ginny” Szalay. Chang also serves on the UF BME External Advisory Board.
The professorship recognizes faculty who demonstrate exceptional achievement in biomedical engineering, along with excellence in education and mentorship and a strong commitment to leadership and service. Its emphasis reflects Samaritan Biologics’ mission to advance innovative medical treatments while supporting broader community engagement and philanthropy.
Jerry Chang, co-founder of Samaritan Biologics and a member of the UF BME External Advisory Board, said:
“Samaritan Biologics is proud to invest $1 million to endow a professorship in biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. Breakthrough science requires not only bold ideas, but also the sustained support needed to move those ideas forward. This gift reflects our belief that investing in exceptional people and innovative research can help advance the future of human health. It also reflects our mission of Helping, Healing and Giving.
“We are especially pleased that Dr. Wes Bolch will serve as the inaugural recipient. His leadership, vision and impact on UF BME exemplify the excellence this professorship was created to support.”
Bolch was selected for his excellence in research, education, mentorship and service, as well as his leadership in medical and health physics. His research focuses on optimizing the use of ionizing radiation in medical imaging and cancer radiotherapy, aiming to balance diagnostic image quality and therapeutic efficacy while minimizing radiation-related cancer risk and toxicity to healthy organs.
Bolch directs UF’s Advanced Laboratory for Radiation Dosimetry Studies (ALRADS), which employs advanced methods for evaluating patient-specific radiation dose and associated health risks. His laboratory was among the first to develop scalable, anatomically realistic computational human models that enable the prediction of radiation doses, or dosimetry. These models can provide guidance for a wide range of medical applications, including radiation-based imaging, such as CT scans, and radiation cancer treatments.
For example, his lab is developing patient-specific dosimetry tools for radiation-based therapies used to treat advanced cancers. Through an NIH National Cancer Institute program project grant with collaborators across the U.S., Bolch’s laboratory is developing microscale organ models that may be at risk during radiopharmaceutical therapy. The ultimate goal is to provide doctors with tools to maximize tumor cell destruction while keeping radiation exposure to healthy organs below toxicity thresholds for each individual patient. This work has led to several landmark medical publications, such as a 2025 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that determined the risk of CT scans for pediatric patients with hematological cancers.
A triple Gator and second-generation UF engineering professor, Bolch earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from UF in 1984, 1986 and 1988, respectively. After beginning his academic career at Texas A&M University, he returned to UF in 1994.
Bolch was an inaugural faculty member in the University of Florida Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program, established before the formal department’s creation. He later joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering when the medical physics faculty and the graduate program moved into BME, and he has continued to serve BME students while maintaining an engineering connection to UF’s medical physics program.