Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Biological Engineering (BE) -- Why "BME" is a Minor and why "BE" might be a Major

Biomedical Engineering and Biological Engineering – What are they and how are they related?

The MIT School of Engineering has pioneered an expansion and redefinition of “Bio/Medical” Engineering. The classical focus on engineering applications in medicine (“Medical” Engineering) has a distinguished history at MIT, and remains vibrant with current course offerings reflecting cutting-edge research in telemedicine, vision enhancement, medical informatics, brain-machine interfaces, device design, and many other areas as part of the curricula of several departments.
The molecular and genomic revolutions in biology place it as a new foundational science for engineering, joining the well-established engineering foundations of physics, chemistry and math. MIT is an international leader in forging a disciplinary connection with biology – “Biological” Engineering -- that has applications ranging from biotechnology to electronic materials (and of course, medicine!). As with other revolutions in basic science, engineering analysis, design, and synthesis are needed to translate breakthrough discoveries into products and create new industries. Biological applications are integrated into the core curricula of most MIT engineering departments, and are the entire focus of the Biological Engineering Division, created in 1998 foster development of world-leading new degree programs that fuse biology and engineering by bringing engineering and biology faculty together in one academic unit.

Here we describe the educational delineations between “Biomedical Engineering” and “Biological Engineering” and the current status of MIT undergraduate educational programs in these areas.

Biomedical Engineering – The BME Minor Degree

Biomedical Engineering is the application of all types of engineering to all types of problems in clinical medicine. Biomedical Engineers develop new robotic surgery procedures, non-invasive imaging modalities, diagnostic procedures analyzing heart signals, telemedicine programs, and a range of other technologies that help diagnose and treat disease better. Biomedical Engineering includes many application areas and approaches that do not require a foundation in modern biology, and thus there are many educational and research opportunities in the various School of Engineering Departments for students who have a strong interest in clinical medicine and in engineering but only a modest interest in biology. At the same time, a new discipline of Biological Engineering is emerging at the interface of biology and engineering, as described below, and is becoming one of the contributing engineering disciplines to Biomedical Engineering. MIT is taking a leading role in defining this new discipline at the graduate and undergraduate level.
Because the field of biomedical engineering is quite diverse, defining a single set of core fundamentals that will provide students with the kind of problem-solving skills they will need to adapt to rapidly-changing technologies and market-places has not yet been possible to do. A good grounding in one of the core engineering or science disciplines gives students the flexibility to pursue almost any type of interest following their undergraduate education at MIT, and to remain flexible throughout their careers long after they leave MIT. We thus developed the BME minor degree program to provide students with an interest in biomedical engineering an opportunity to include a coherent plan of coursework in biomedical engineering along with their major. The BME minor prepares students for graduate school or industry with approximately the same depth as a major in BME at comparable schools other than MIT. The BME minor is open to all undergraduate majors at MIT, but is best when combined with a science or engineering major. Some departments are also developing tracks that emphasize the interface of engineering with biology or medicine. The requirements for the BME minor are listed separately on this website, and the bio/medical applications in each of the departments can be found on the departmental websites.

How the BME minor came to be

The BME minor was developed by a group of faculty from Aero and Astro Engineering, Biology, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Health Science & Technology, Mechanical Engineering, and Nuclear Engineering, starting in 1993. Many of these faculty were undergraduate advisors in their departments and saw the need for a unified, interdepartmental program in biomedical engineering. Although MIT had never approved an interdepartmental minor, the faculty felt that a minor would allow improved advising and provide students with recognition for a rigorous program of study. The Institute committees which oversee undergraduate education (COC and CUP) worked with the faculty to develop an appropriate educational and administrative structure for the minor, and the program was approved by a vote of the full MIT faculty in April, 1995. The BME minor was administered by the Center for Biomedical Engineering until the formation of BE(H) in July, 1998 and it now has the status of a departmental program. Many of the same faculty who developed the minor are now faculty in BE and thus serve on the undergraduate program committee and advise students, and are working to develop a major in Biological Engineering.

Biological Engineering as a Discipline, Distinct from the Applied Field of Biomedical Engineering
The molecular and genomics revolutions in biology place the science of biology as a new foundational science for engineering, joining the well-established engineering foundations of physics, chemistry and math. As with other revolutions in basic science, engineering analysis, design, and synthesis are needed to translate breakthrough discoveries into products and create new industries – and to foster further developments in the basic science. Biological problems have already become a frontier application area for established engineering disciplines, and this expansion into biology is expected to continue robustly. Many departments are establishing dedicated tracks devoted to biological or biomedical engineering and are hiring new faculty in these areas. However, each established engineering discipline is naturally limited to addressing a certain range of problems within biology that fall within the scope of tools and approaches of that discipline. The fusion of engineering with modern biology, then, requires development of a new discipline of engineering, “Biological Engineering,” which brings to bear on biology the appropriate tools and perspectives from chemical, civil, computer, electrical, materials, mechanical, and nuclear engineering in an integrated way. Biological Engineering is not envisioned as replacing the individual efforts, but rather enhancing them by pushing new frontiers. “Biological Engineering” will naturally be one of the contributing disciplines to the applied field of Biomedical Engineering, which we define as the application of engineering broadly to problems in clinical medicine.

To address curriculum development at the interface of biology and engineering, the MIT School of Engineering created a new experimental academic unit, Biological Engineering, in 1998, bringing engineering faculty from several engineering departments together with biology faculty. MIT began offering a PhD degree in Biological Engineering in 1999, requiring 4 core subjects that fuse biology with engineering. The Biological Engineering PhD program, along with all other engineering PhD programs in the School of Engineering, is a gateway program to the Medical Engineering/Medical Physics PhD program, which requires students to complete core PhD-level course work and qualifying exams in one of the engineering departmental programs before moving on to coursework in clinical medicine.
With the core discipline defined at the graduate level, MIT began to translate the program to the undergraduate level by offering a 5-year program leading to the M.Eng. degree in Bioengineering, starting in 2000. Students in the program take some of the core graduate Biological Engineering courses and conduct thesis work. In 2002 a separate track in Medical Engineering was added to the M.Eng. program.

The undergraduate program committee in Biological Engineering began to develop a curriculum for a 4-year SB degree in 2002 and currently offers several of the core courses that will be required by the major if it is approved. These subjects are currently included as subjects in the BME minor, and can be taken by any student who has fulfilled the appropriate prerequisites. We anticipate that the Biological Engineering SB major will be evaluated by the MIT Institute curriculum committees in the 2004-2005 academic year and may be available for students entering MIT in 2005. Updates on progress will be provided regularly on the BE website.

For additional reading, see the following reference:

Griffith, L.G, and A.J. Grodzinsky, "Advances in Biomedical Engineering", JAMA, 285, 556-561 (2001).

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