BIO MEDICAL ENGINEERING

Is Biomedical Engineering Right For Me?

When you enter any engineering discipline you must have a strong interest in science and mathematics in a way that allows you to solve problems of a highly technical nature. For Biomedical Engineering you must be willing to add the life sciences and medical knowledge necessary to understand the frame work of the problems on which you will work.

This is not part of the traditional engineering education and requires not only an above average ability in math and science but also a willingness to embrace these other areas due to the interdisciplinary nature of Biomedical Engineering. The modern life sciences have become more analytical and computer based in their approach to fundamental knowledge and the biomedical industry in now considered one of the leading edge industries whose benefits we are just beginning to reap.

The output of these industries directly benefit the health and well being of people and hence the Biomedical Engineer is often attracted to this humanistic component as well as the advanced technology. Examples are bountiful and include such devices as implantable cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, joint replacement implants, biomedical imaging, novel drug delivery systems, and tissue engineered skin used for grafting. If these topics and applications interest you and you enjoy the challenge of working on such people oriented problems then Biomedical Engineering is for you.

Biomedical Engineers work with a broad range of professionals ranging from other engineering specialties, to basic laboratory scientists, to physicians and nurses. Strong communications skills are essential and often the Biomedical Engineer becomes the general interpreter for such widely educated individuals; the one who knows the language of both engineering and medicine.

What kind of jobs can I get after college?

Biomedical Engineers have a wide range of job opportunities and can include a hospital based practice as a clinical engineer, an industrially based engineer designing medical devices, a technical sales engineer, or a staff engineer in a medical research laboratory. Biomedical Engineers find themselves in wide variety of specialties which may organize around various diseases, such as cancer, or organ systems such as the cardiovascular system, or technology, such as biomaterials or imaging. A Biomedical Engineer may have jobs which involve the following skills and applications:

Develop software to detect abnormal heart rhythms for use in a cardiac pacemaker.Design the next generation of hip implants using modern materials and mechanical design considerations.Investigate and perfect a novel drug delivery method to treat a chronic disease which requires constant blood levels of the particular medicine.Bring a product to market through the Food and Drug Administration's very involved pre-market approval process which requires extensive clinical testing.Manage a large hospital based group of biomedical equipment technicians and provide the hospital with engineering expertise in the evaluation of new and expensive technologies.Design and build a unique research device as part of a multidisciplinary research team to enable scientific discovery.Advance the state of the art one of the many modern imaging modalities (PET, MRI, CAT scans) either in the progression of current technology or the development of new ones.Develop an advanced coding/stimulation scheme for a cochlear implant which provides auditory inputs to people with significant hearing deficits.Analyze a special communications or mobility need of a handicapped patient and develop the appropriate enabling technology.
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