MIT – Bioengineering

Innovation, invention, industry and impact

26 February 2014

Day 2 was the tale of the four I’s innovation, invention, industry and impact.
All words we are aware of in the UK but the people I met at Northeastern University and MIT today are doing things a little bit differently.

From a bioengineering perspective I have already realised that it is a very heterogeneous landscape here in the USA. MIT have their very specific approach BU theres and Northeastern a different approach again.

Northeastern’s Department of Bioengineering was officially founded in January 2014, that’s not a typo that really was last month. Previously there has been, as in other institutions a lot of biomedical engineering research undertaken in different engineering Departments. When considering what ‘bioengineering’ is to Northeastern it is still an evolving entity, but what is special about Northeastern is their co-op and educational outreach programmes.

Their co-op programme is a 5 year undergraduate degree which involves three 6-month placements in industry. In total the students leave the programme with 18-months of work experience alongside their degree. Through these placements the students have the opportunity to experience different industries or to specialise in one discipline.

This system works well for Northeastern as it is a cross-University programme, they have the people and resources to support it and their location in Boston, surrounded by a number of big companies who can host students in this way. What will be interesting as the bioengineering undergraduate course develops will be how the biomedical engineers compete with the mechanical engineers and the electrical engineers who have, in the absence of biomedical engineers in the co-op scheme, been doing placements in orthopaedic companies, prosthetics, medical devices, etc.

The key points I got from my meeting with Claire Duggan from the Centre for STEM education were that there are a lot of similarities in the UK and US systems regarding the presence of ‘outreach’ in research grants. Students, both undergraduate and postgraduate are great ambassadors and role models for high school students, students when given freedom and support to create new outreach activities can be really creative. STEM outreach in the US is a crowded party that everyone wants to be at, the Centre for STEM education’s approach is through a series of programmes as a framework of delivery. For any HE pathway to impact fanatics reading this you’ll also be pleased to hear that the US have the Broader Impacts programme that is spreading through US Universities at the moment.

I also met with inventor and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Michael Cima while at MIT. Professor Cima is based in the innovative cancer engineering centre at MIT, known as the Koch Institute. Aside from leading research in the cancer engineering field, for the past 6 years Professor Cima has also been the Faculty Director of the Lemelson-MIT programme. He had a clear passion for encouraging invention or the inventors mind set in young people. The programme of activities run as part of the Lemelson MIT programme has grown over time with Inventeens, inventeams and a number of notable awards. I was interested in Professor Cima’s description about the importance of role model inventors for young people to aspire to be like, when they grow up, and how involvement in the programme doesn’t just give students the practical hands on inventing skills and outlook, but also role models at a number of levels to inspire them.

I will finish of this blog with some wise words from Professor Cima about, in his view the three things that make a great inventor/ innovator:
– curiosity: collecting solutions to problems they haven’t encountered yet
– empathy: uncanny ability to see problem from the users eyes.
– leadership: no one person has all the solutions, they have the ability to recruit the right people with the right skills to solve those problems.

‘Til next post
Jenna

The beginning…

jstevens

25 February 2014

Monday February 24th marked the first day of my two week tour of US bioengineering institutions and a fascinating start it has been.

I began my day at MIT where Professor Doug Lauffenburger had arranged a comprehensive schedule of meetings for me to gain an insight about bioengineering at MIT.

At MIT they approach bioengineering from the biological angle, as Professor Lauffenburger described to me in the morning each engineering discipline has a scientific knowledge base with a range of applications. However bioengineering has traditionally approached it differently with a broad foundation in a range of disciplines including maths, physics, chemistry and biology but with one primary application area of healthcare/ medicine.

This was an interesting approach that got me thinking about where Imperial fitted within these two approaches. In my opinion Imperial views bioengineering in a more ‘square’ than triangular approach with a broad foundation of science and engineering and a broad range of applications.

Although I sense a lot of similarities between Imperial and MIT the distinct difference between the two institutions was the biological basis of the undergraduate course at MIT compared to the engineering basis of the undergraduate course at Imperial.

While at MIT I also met with Professor Roger Kamm and Professor Ron Weiss, two professors who represent distinctly different areas of bioengineering. Professor Kamm biomechanics and Professor Weiss synthetic biology.

What struck me from the meeting with Professor Weiss was the recognised importance of design in engineering and particularly synthetic and systems biology. Weiss is also one half of the two professor team jointly teaching a course at MIT and UC Berkeley with Professor Adam Arkin via alternating video link.

Professor Kamm introduced the Institute for Medical Engineering and Health (IMES) to me as the MIT equivalent to the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) at Imperial College London. “IMES aims to accelerate innovation across a spectrum of activities that span discovery, design, and delivery of new medical devices and products” whereas “IBME draws together scientists, medics and engineers to apply their extensive expertise to create revolutionary progress in medical diagnosis and treatment.”

While at MIT I also met with Dan Darling the Industry Outreach Coordinator, Dr Agi Stachowiak and Dr Natalie Kuldell. What was clear from these meetings is the clear comparisons between Imperial and MIT, from provision of summer school programmes, social media management and industry engagement to embedding communication and other transferable skills within academic courses and having vision for development of outreach/ engagement activities. Including the importance of high school education on the development of undergraduate courses.

The second Institutional stop on the tour was Boston University (BU) and their Chair of the Department Professor Solomon Eisenberg. BU have a different approach to bioengineering to MIT, with a biomedical engineering focus and a high number of undergraduate students (545 in 2012-13) compared to the 178 biological engineering majors at MIT and 293 biomedical engineering undergraduates at Imperial.

The BU Department of Bioengineering is also one of the earliest with foundations in the 1966, another interesting observation about the Department at BU is that it is only one of three engineering Departments at Boston University. The others being Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. The Department was also awarded one of the three Whitaker Foundation Leadership Awards back in 1996 alongside Johns Hopkins University and University of California- San Diego.

The Department of Bioengineering at BU also runs a course on Advanced Biomedical Design and Development Project as part of their postgraduate MEng in biomedical engineering. In this course students are immersed in the clinical environment for 6-8 weeks to gain an insight into the clinical area they will be developing a product for.

All in all its been a fascinating first day, lots of parallels with bioengineering in the UK and some expected differences. I for one am excited to see what further insight the rest of the trip has to offer.

‘Til next post
Jenna