Biomedical engineering
Virginia schools trying to keep pace with growing demand in specialty

by Heather B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
June 2007

Five years ago, the number of biomedical engineering programs around the country hit 90, making some people wonder if engineering schools were producing too many graduates in that field.

Now that doubt has been erased. “The debate has been completely flipped to ask: ‘Are we producing enough of these students?’” says Thomas C. Skalak, chairman of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Virginia.

The U.S. Department of Labor says the number of biomedical engineering jobs nationwide will increase by 31.4 percent by the end of 2010, a growth rate that is considerably faster than for disciplines such as aerospace, civil, industrial and nuclear engineering. Skalak says the demand for biomedical engineers is being driven by the swelling number of innovative biotechnology startups in the U.S. and the changing philosophy of medical device companies that are trying to more closely unite technology with biology and medicine.

Engineering schools in Virginia are doing their best to stay on top of this demand curve. Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) started its undergraduate and graduate biomedical engineering programs in 1984. The University of Virginia, which has had a graduate bioengineering program in place since 1967, began an undergraduate program in 2003. Virginia Tech recently teamed up with the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., to establish the School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES). And George Mason University is in the early stages of planning its undergraduate biomedical engineering program.

Shu Chien, a professor at the University of California-San Diego and president of the Biomedical Engineering Society, says that the overall growth of biomedical engineering programs is due in large part to the work of the Whitaker Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington. Between 1976 and 2006 the foundation donated hundreds of millions of dollars to biomedical engineering education. The recipients included VCU and U.Va.

The foundation’s impact has been far-reaching, Chien says. The number of undergraduate and graduate biomedical engineering programs grew from seven in the 1970s to nearly 100 today. As a result, he believes that the supply of biomedical engineers is essentially keeping pace with demand. Moreover, he says, “Student interest in this field is growing just as rapidly as the jobs.”

Integrating engineering and life sciences
Biomedical engineers have been instrumental over the last couple of decades in coming up with technology to improve patient care, including MRI machines, heart monitors, dialysis machines, cochlear implants, bone plates, prosthetics and artificial joints. But biomedical engineers today also use their training to design and grow new organ and vascular tissue or help map neuroprocesses as they are to develop a more efficient pacemaker.

“It’s really just an interesting applica­tion of everything else that’s already been learned in other engineering disciplines and applying it to a different medium, which is the human body,” says Scott Robertson, a fourth-year bioengineering student at the University of Virginia.

Biomedical engineering curricula have evolved as well, fully integrating life sciences with engineering. Students are no longer simply traditional engineers who also take a few biology and anatomy classes. They now study biomechanics, biomedical signals processing, artificial organs and bio-transport mechanisms. They even follow physicians on hospital rounds and participate in medical procedures.

“The old bio-engineering curriculum emphasized things like electrical circuit design so you could build a pacemaker, which meant that you were more like an electrical engineer who knew a little bit about how to connect the wires to biological tissue,” says Skalak. “Now the curriculum is much more about understanding cell and molecular biology, and we have students working on biological questions like the origin of disease. They get used to working in an environment where they have to apply mathematics, computation and engineering to biology from Day One. And that was not done historically.”

This emphasis on biology is why Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering sought out the Wake Forest School of Medicine when it began developing a graduate-level biomedical engineering program. The arrangement allows students to take classes at both campuses and earn a joint degree. The program has more than 50 students pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering.

Brian Love, a biomechanics and engineering professor at Virginia Tech, says biomedical engineering students are completely immersed in the life sciences. They attend medical courses at Wake Forest and take Virginia Tech classes that teach engineering principles in the context of physiologic and biologic systems. Students can also apply their skills in research projects at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech.

Meanwhile, George Mason University makes plans for its biomedical engineering program. Lloyd Griffiths, dean of the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering, says that the program will take advantage of the uni versity’s work in proteomics and computer science, which will give graduates an edge in areas like tissue engineering, neuroengineering and neuromodeling.

“Quite frankly, what I view as high priority for us is to have the kind of research programs that will begin to spin out some new startups in these exciting areas,” says Griffiths. “We’re in the process right now of trying to put together an angel network to fund some exciting new biotechnology companies in Northern Virginia that we’ve not been in before.”

George Mason hired Peter Katona, the former president and CEO of the Whitaker Foundation, to help design the program. Major coursework won’t be available for at least five years, according to Griffiths, but concentrated coursework and minors in the field could be offered as early as this fall.

Creative careers
Biomedical engineers with bachelor’s degrees earn an average annual salary of $48,500 out of school, while those with master’s degrees are earning an average of $60,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But as demand has increased, so too have salaries, and some biomedical engineers are now commanding as much as $70,000 straight out of undergraduate school, says Gerald Miller, chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department at VCU. His program gets 400 to 500 applications for 60 undergraduate slots each year.

The profession, he notes, represents a smorgasbord of opportunity for students, who are recruited by major medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, small biotech startups, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Food and Drug Administration and other federal regulatory agencies and clinical laboratories.

When Roanoke-based Luna Inno­va­tions added medical devices and biomaterials to its repertoire of research and development projects four years ago, it began hiring biomedical engineers to supplement its team of traditional engineers, molecular biologists, biochemists and physicists.

Biomedical engineers have been invaluable to Luna’s efforts to develop advanced ultrasound technology and biosensors, as well as bio-coatings and bio-textiles that can promote wound healing, says Tom Wavering, the company’s vice president of technology development and the head of its Charlottesville office.

“Biomedical engineers can easily bridge that communication and cultural gap between, say, the mechanical engineers who are devising a medical device and the biologist who understands the need for that device,” he says. “As a result, we have been able to work much more efficiently in this field and achieve results faster.”

In fact, this unique perspective is one reason why some of the most promising pre-med students are now pursuing their bachelor’s degrees in biomedical engineering rather than biology. At VCU, 50 percent of graduates from its undergraduate biomedical engineering department go on to medical school.

“All things being equal, medical schools tend to accept biomedical engineers over biology and other majors,” says Miller. “And it’s because [medical schools] know they will make far more knowledgeable physicians who will be able to utilize advances in technology more so than the other majors. They are not only familiar with the medical technologies, but they know exactly how they work, and that’s not a minor thing.”

(Although it doesn’t offer a biomedical engineering degree, Old Dominion University has a joint program with Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk that provides pre-med students with a bachelor’s degree in engineering or engineering technology. Students in the program study biomedical engineering principles and participate in medical research programs as part of the curriculum. They automatically enter Eastern Virginia Medical School when they graduate from the ODU program.)

Biomedical engineering’s emphasis on finding solutions to medical problems makes the field especially appealing to women, a historically underrepresented group in the engineering disciplines. Skalak notes that women make up 50 percent of U.Va.’s undergraduate program, and Love says two-thirds of his graduate research assistants at Virginia Tech have been women.

“When the types of projects that you’re working on are related to engineering new tissue or coming up with more effective cancer therapies and better diagnostic imaging for mammography, students in general, but especially women, have a significantly different level of enthusiasm for the work than they do for, say, other more traditional areas of engineering,” Love says.

Robertson, the U.Va. student, says biomedical engineering offers him the chance to be truly creative. He has been offered a slot in a two-year leadership program with GE Healthcare, where he’ll work to develop the next generation of functional MRI machines, “There are opportunities to do things in this field that have never been done before,” he says. “You’re not just improving upon something, like building stronger bridges. You might actually invent a whole new device or a whole new way of doing something. It’s really the next frontier of engineering.”