Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. William Hillenbrand’s then anonymous donation of $500,000 to establish biomedical engineering research at Purdue. That initial seed investment brought us Drs. Leslie Geddes, Willis Tacker, Joe Bourland, and Charles Babbs to Purdue who put Purdue BME on the map with more than 30 inventions, many of which focused on implantable electronic devices including and energy-efficient implantable defibrillator and the automatic pacemaker.