DESIGN TRANSFORMS scientific knowledge into reality. It is the essence of engineering. Today's remarkable advances in biotechnology and medicine demand that biomedical engineers receive special training to bring the promises of these advances to fruition. Creating new medical instruments, making the world accessible to people with disabilities or developing new therapeutic devices and treatments requires that we educate engineers in multiple disciplines, foster innovation and instill a strong command of design. Our objective is to offer a unique program that promotes design throughout the education of biomedical engineers.
Biomedical Engineering Design Expo. Each semester Biomedical Engineering students present posters and prototypes resulting from their design projects in our building's atrium. |
Design is best learned by increments and mentoring, which is why we engage our students in design throughout their education. Our innovative approach to team-based learning in design courses enables students at early and intermediate levels to work together and allows beginning students to learn from the experience of their more advanced peers. We intend to integrate additional aspects of design into the entire curriculum, offering new courses and laboratory exercises targeted at providing biomedical engineers with the tools necessary to design new medical devices, instruments, treatments and rehabilitation technologies.
The Biomedical Engineering Department is pleased to solicit projects to provide service-learning opportunities for our students and solutions to biomedical-relevant problems for our clients. Students will choose their semester projects based in large part on the information provided by the client. We seek focused, specific design projects. Note that these projects should be design, not research, and should have a specific goal in mind. As an example, appropriate projects for this course may consist of the design of a device to perform a specific task in your laboratory or clinical practice.
Teams consist of about four students for each project, and they are encouraged to build prototypes of their designs, which are given to the clients. Many of our clients have been quite pleased with the productivity and innovation demonstrated by our students. Several of the past projects have provided investigators with tools to work in new directions. Some projects have led to intellectual property with opportunities for commercialization.
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For examples of projects that were conducted this semester, please see the following link: Current Projects. Also, please see Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for information about student and client responsibilities including expenses to clients: FAQs
Students take six design courses as part of the BME undergraduate degree. Students in these two courses are combined together so that each team consists of half sophomores and half juniors. Each sophomore is assigned a junior mentor on his/her team. These courses are taught independently — the sophomores work together on a project, and the juniors do a project that leads to their senior year project.
The courses involve an experiential learning process using real-world projects and clients. Students are expected to identify and understand the problem to be solved, to propose several conceptual design solutions, then follow up on one particular solution and create a prototype.