What is biomedical engineering?Biomedical engineering (BME) is a multidisciplinary field that applies engineering principles and design methods to improve the interaction and integration of engineering with medical and biological sciences for improving human health and solving healthcare challenges.
What does the undergraduate major offer?The UK College of Engineering is pleased to offer a new four-year bachelor of science (BS) degree in BME that will provide students with a unique set of qualitative and quantitative healthcare problem definition, analysis, and solution skills.
Who will benefit from the program?The undergraduate BME program is designed for students who aspire to engineer innovative treatments, devices, materials, technologies or processes that improve human healthcare. Outstanding students seeking careers in industry, the healthcare professions, government agencies or graduate studies in BME are most likely to maximize the benefits of this program.
What does it look like?This program begins with the First-Year Engineering experience, which grounds students in foundational engineering courses. After receiving acceptance into the biomedical engineering program, students begin taking required BME courses. The program culminates in a unique two-semester interdisciplinary Capstone Senior Design project that challenges students to creatively engineer a solution to a healthcare issue posed by collaborating industrial or healthcare partners. BME and product design courses jointly created and taught by BME and College of Design faculty build “design-thinking” into students’ approach to solving healthcare problems and form the backbone of the BME major.
What is Design Thinking?Most BME programs teach students how to solve problems, but they don’t teach how to interact with people in ways that allow for a deeper understanding of the problem. Design Thinking emphasizes the people who will use what our students develop. College of Design faculty members’ knowledge of user experience, user interface and more will help BME students empathize and detect unarticulated needs.
Our Design Thinking experiences balance left-brain technology-oriented learning with right-brain creative-oriented learning to build crucial skills such as 1) communicating empathetically with all stakeholders in a design cycle; 2) framing healthcare challenges as engineering problems; and 3) designing, prototyping, building, testing, refining and implementing solutions that solve contemporary healthcare challenges problems and meet all user needs.
Abhijit Patwardhan Department Chair
Kimberly Anderson Director of Undergraduate Studies
