Vol. 3 No. 1 September 2004

The BioTECH Quarterly

"Bio" + "Engineering" Options: BE Major & much more

In addition to the anticipated Biological Engineering major, there are many other “Bio” + “Engineering” options offered at MIT. Here is a sample of student perspectives from different departments:

Dawn Wendell ’04 ~ Mechanical Engineering & Biology, BME Minor
Yin Ren ’06 ~ Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, BME Minor
Priya Shah ’05 ~ Chemical Engineering, BME Minor
Issel Lim ’05 ~ Biology, BME & Toxicology Minor
Christina Fuentes ’05 ~ Brain & Cognitive Sciences, BME Minor
Brian Chase ’06 ~ Biology & Biological Engineering (planned)

A look at Bioelectrical Engineering & Computational Biology

"Would I have majored in BE instead of EECS if it was available? Probably not, just because I can take classes in both disciplines regardless, and I enjoy Course VI classes in general. BME is connected with so many other majors, sometimes it doesn’t really matter what Course you choose to be in."

By Yin Ren ‘06, EECS, BME Minor

    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), as unrelated as it may sound to Biomedical Engineering, actually has a tremendous amount of biomedically related applications and offers plenty of research opportunities as well.

    For an electrical engineer, the first image that conjures up in one’s mind is most likely someone working on circuits and making gizmos. Indeed, making advanced medical instruments for doctors had been the traditional application of EE in BME. One of the most intensely studied fields of current medical engineering – imaging technologies in radiology such as MRI – has everything to do with signal processing of Course VI. Electrophysiology is another example, where interactions and behaviors of molecules and tissues are examined through electromagnetic fields and electrostatic interactions.

    In computer science, much research is currently devoted to bioinformatics and computation. The MIT Computational and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBi, http://csbi.mit.edu), for example, “links biologists, computer scientists, and engineers in a multi-disciplinary approach to the systematic analysis of complex biological phenomena.” Overall, EECS offers an enormous amount of opportunities for research in biomedically related areas, most of them at the Master’s and PhD levels.

    So, everything sounds good thus far. Connections between the two disciplines make plenty of research opportunities available. This is especially true at MIT, where undergraduates can take on projects without being limited by their own majors.

    I work with Professor Jongyoon Han in the Research Lab of Electronics, analyzing separations of biomolecules such as proteins and DNA on a nanoscale. Much of our work is done on MEMS (Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Devices) such as microfluidic chips. Many other students from Course VI are doing UROP’s in bioengineering and computational biology labs.

    When one takes a look at the Course VI curriculum, however, the undergraduate courses do not offer adequate preparation for BME related research. Yes, there is an area of concentration in VI-1 (EE), known as Bioelectrical Engineering. Under that heading, however, only three or four courses are offered: 6.021, 6.022 (biophysics and physiology), 6.024 (biomechanics), and 6.121 (bioelectronics lab).

A new course is planned to be taught next spring, an undergraduate version of “BE.430, Fields, Forces, and Flows in Biological Systems,” which fills the current gap in some ways. There are quite a few CS/computational biology courses offered jointly through other departments such as HST, but only on the graduate level at this point.

    In a way, the Course VI curriculum is “falling behind” in updating its undergraduate courses to reflect and keep pace with the changes in Biomedical Engineering. When one takes a look at some of the other Engineering Departments at MIT, there is Mechanical Engineering Biotrack (2A), where “students pursuing this curriculum will be educated in bioengineering subjects with a strong mechanical engineering disciplinary background.” Chemical Engineering also has Course 10B for Chemical-Biological Engineering. Course VI, however, has yet to formulate a biotrack. There are only three available options: VI-1 for EE, VI-2 for EECS, VI-3 for CS; no VI-4 for Bioelectrical Engineering yet.

    As the new Biological Engineering (BE) major is being finalized, we will face even more options in choosing our majors. Would I have majored in BE instead of EECS if it was available? Probably not, just because I can take classes in both disciplines regardless, and I enjoy Course VI classes in general. BME is connected with so many other majors, sometimes it doesn’t really matter what Course you choose to be in.

Yin Ren ’06 would like to give special thanks to his advisor, Prof. Alan Grodzinsky, for providing many insightful comments and suggestions during the discussions. Yin can be reached at <yinren@mit.edu>.