Month: February 2014

A well rounded student

In my first few months at Imperial I learnt that there is something quite special about our students. But I often wondered whether this was due to Imperial or to biomedical engineering. It’s probably a combination of the two, but what my discussion with Professor Clark Hung at Columbia illustrated to me was that there is something special about biomedical engineering students.

The relative gender equality of undergraduate biomedical engineering is an anomaly in an engineering school that has been consistent at every institution I have visited so far. But it isn’t really that surprising that girl’s would be attracted to a discipline where they can apply their skills and interest in physics and maths to real-life scenarios such as developing a new prosthetic limb, rehabilitation device or an improved drug-delivery mechanism.

Innovation, invention, industry and impact

Day 2 was the tale of the four I’s innovation, invention, industry and impact. All words we are aware of in the UK but the people I met at Northeastern University and MIT today are doing things a little bit differently.

From a bioengineering perspective I have already realised that it is a very heterogeneous landscape here in the USA. MIT have their very specific approach BU theres and Northeastern a different approach again.

Northeastern’s Department of Bioengineering was officially founded in January 2014, that’s not a typo that really was last month. Previously there has been, as in other institutions a lot of biomedical engineering research undertaken in different engineering Departments.

The beginning…

Monday February 24th marked the first day of my two week tour of US bioengineering institutions and a fascinating start it has been.

I began my day at MIT where Professor Doug Lauffenburger had arranged a comprehensive schedule of meetings for me to gain an insight about bioengineering at MIT.

At MIT they approach bioengineering from the biological angle, as Professor Lauffenburger described to me in the morning each engineering discipline has a scientific knowledge base with a range of applications. However bioengineering has traditionally approached it differently with a broad foundation in a range of disciplines including maths, physics, chemistry and biology but with one primary application area of healthcare/ medicine.

Hello world!

Hello readers

Welcome to the Imperial Bioengineering Blog. This blog will evolve to cover a whole range of bioengineering, so if you are interested in finding out more about the research, innovations and generally cool stuff that is going on in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London and the discipline more globally then this is the blog for you.

But why, you may wonder has the Department decided to start a blog now? There is a very good reason for this, which I will dedicate the rest of this first blog to answering.

Bioengineering is the fastest growing discipline of engineering.