How about an aviation school that saves lives in operating rooms? Or a first-of-its-kind remote human anatomy course for occupational therapy students? Or novel sensors that detect minute quantities of prostate cancer antigen with acoustics, not chemistry?

Welcome to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where you practically trip over cool technology around every corner. It's yet another one of Michigan's so-called second tier of universities that is doing simply amazing things.

Wednesday at Western began before dawn, breakfast at the best egg joint in Kalamazoo, Rykse's, with Len Ginsberg, vice president for research. Ginsberg said WMU does about $30 million a year in sponsored research, with increasing emphasis on practical research vs. basic science.

Ginsberg told me about stuff that wasn't on the official agenda, including the work of paper and chemical engineering professor Margaret Joyce in using metallic inks to print working circuts on a variety of substrates. Ginsberg said it's a hot commodity, with lots of comapnies interested, and talks are under way for a complex new press that will serve as the focus of a center for electornic printing. He also said the work in green manufacturing of manufacturing engineering professor John Patten is in high demand.

WMU faculty is also working on new ways to use computer technology and behavior psychology to treat depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ginsberg said tech transfer is becoming more and more a fact of life among the WMU faculty.

"That's the neat thing right now, you see it building," Ginsberg said. "It came first in the life science area but now it's moving into all these other areas as the faculty begins to see the potential of their work to help economic development. A few years ago these folks (faculty members) would have said, 'I wouldn't know where to start.' Nowadays a lot of people know someone in a startup, so now they know."

After breakfast it was off to yet another huge new building on Western's campus, the 200,000-square-foot College of Health and Human Services building on the eastern edge of campus near the edge of the former Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital. Itopened in 2005 and contains WMU's programs in occupational therapy, physician's assistant training, social work, speech therapy, audiology, nursing, blindness and low vision studies and more.

The building wasn't a LEED-certified energy-saving building when it was built, but it's pursuing the certification now, with touches like cork flooring, rice paper in the walls and motion-sensitive automatic lighting.

I got a fascinating demonstration of telepresence technology with Jackie West-Fraser, clinical specialist in occupational therapy and director of WMU's Grand Rapids occupational therapy degree program. She showed me new instructional technology that will allow Grand Rapids students to participate in cadaver studies at the main campus in Kalamazoo.

Then it was out to Western's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a 343,000-square-foot building that opened in 2003. It anchors the WMU Business, Technology and Research Park, a former WMU experimental farm in the southwest corner of Kalamazoo about three miles from the main campus.

There, I met Massoud Atashbar, associate professor of electrical engieering, who'sworking on acoustic sensors that detect prostate-specific antigen -- a marker for prostate cancer -- at lower levels than the current state of the art. That allows prostate cancer to be treated earlier, improving outcomes. The project is funded by a Department of Defense grant.

Atashbar and his band of graduate students are also involved in a bunch of other research, some of which sounds outlandish -- for instance, they're implanting devices in insects that allows humans to make the insect fly off and even control its direction, essentially turning bugs into robots. (Atashbar worked on that project on sabbatical at the University of Michigan, with an assist from Michigan State University and Michigan Technological University.) They're also working on a wide variety of sensor technologies with a wide variety of appliations, from the military to life sciences to food safety.

So is Ekkehard Sinn, chemistry department chair, who's principal investigator on a grant to produce tiny sensors to detect toxins used in warfare and terror attacks. WMU is working on the project with AltairNano of Reno, Nevada. The project combines WMU’s expertise in chemistry and nanoscience is complemented with AltairNano’s expertise in sensor design. The final product is intended to be a hand held device that can be used in the field.   

The sensor employs sophisticated chemistry developed in by a team from WMU’s Department of Chemistry, Department of Biological Sciences and the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Next it was time for lunch in beautiful Walwit Hall, WMU's original small student union and a women's residence hall, which has now been converted to offices.

Michael Sharer, director of technology transfer, licensing and commercialization, told me things "couldn't be going better" in his operation. Invention disclosures have jumped to 15 to 20 per year from just two a year on average from 1978 to 2004. Patent applications are up to roughly five a year from an average of one a year in that 1978-2004 period.

Western has also hired a new "entrepreneur in residence" to review the growing pile of intellectual property flowing through Sharer's department and suggest candidates for spinout as startup businesses. Then he'll be in charge of raising money for the spinouts. It's assumed the staffer hired, Jay Hoinville, will eventually lead one of the spinouts. (Hoinville has a background in software and electrical engineering and was formerly CEO of a small electronics firm in Kalamazoo, Micromagnetica.)

Next, Sharer said he'd like to hire a staffer like Hoinville to go through candidates for licensing rather than spinout, and get those technologies licensed into the marketplace.

Also in on the lunch was K.C. O'Shaughnessy, a professor of management at Western's Haworth College of Business, who will soon be running a new center for entrepreneurship and innovation at WMU.

The goal of the new center, he said, "is to build skills awareness and culture towards entrepreneurship within the business school." The program will be more undergraduate-centric than other entrepreneurship programs at other Michigan schools, and will focus more on getting entrepreneurism into the syllabus of more business classes.

My last stop of the day was yet another WMU college that was away from main campus -- the College of Aviation, which has since 1997 been housed at the former W.K. Kellogg Airport passenger terminal and adjoining buildings in Battle Creek.

The airport features a 10,000-foot-long runway, second longest in the state, and his home to 650 students and a fleet of 30 Cirrus SR-20 single-engine trainers, six Piper Seneca twin-engine trainers, and a Cessna Conquest twin-engine corporate jet.

Beth M. Beaudin-Seiler, a research assistant at the, College of Aviation, told me about her work with William Hammann, a WMU research scientist who's had dual careers as a cardiologist and a pilot for United Airlines.

Beaudin-Seiler said Hammann spent about 15 years researching the way communication among an airliner's crew is the key to avoiding crashes, boiling it down to 12 key skills that can be taught. Once Hamman started hearing about roughly 100,000 deaths a year in the United States due to medical error, he started adapting that curriculum to the health care industry.

Hammann formed a spinout company, PSO One, that attracted $4.2 million in grants from the Michigan Economic Development Corp., Battle Creek Unlimited and Illinois-based Forest Park Foundation to develop the 12 key skills into a marketable product.

Lansing's Risk Management and Patient Safety Institute is partnering with PSO One to conduct simulations for health care clients using the methodology.

From Battle Creek I hit the long, lonesome highway, looking forward to Thursday's visit to one of Michgan's "big three" research schools -- the mighty Green and White of Michigan State.