Michael Shuler, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering at Cornell, has been named to lead a newly established program to integrate the life sciences into engineering education, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Shuler's appointment as director of the cross-campus program for Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Cornell is effective immediately, and he will step down on July 1 as director of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, a post he has held since 1998.
Making the announcement, Harold Craighead, interim dean of the College of Engineering, said he was confident that Shuler "will provide strong leadership to the program."
The program will, for the first time, link graduate and undergraduate programs in biomedical engineering and provide a structure to support all Cornell teaching in the field. Laboratory space and equipment in Kimball Hall, is being set up with help from a $400,000 grant from Intel Corp. The laboratory will provide graduate and undergraduate students with hands-on experience in four core teaching areas: drug delivery, nanobiotechnology, biosensors and bio-micro-electro-mechanical systems (known as bio-MEMS).
The BME program is being established within the college but also will involve faculty and assistance from the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Arts and Sciences and Veterinary Medicine. "We envision courses being team taught by faculty from life sciences and engineering," said Shuler. The graduate field of BME already has 29 members, nine of whom are in the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.
Behind the establishment of the new program is a profound debate about the future of engineering education at Cornell. At present, there is no requirement that biology be taught to undergraduates in the engineering college, although, says Craighead, the incorporation of biology into the required curriculum is actively under discussion. "We now expect our graduates to be conversant with computers, with chemistry and physics," he said. "One can image adding biology to that list in order to be a modern engineer."
There are indications that engineering students are hearing this. Every fall and spring a bioengineering seminar is required for undergraduates or graduates taking bioengineering. Enrollments typically have been 50 to 60 each semester, but last semester's enrollment was more than 90. And last semester's enrollment in a graduate-level course in fundamentals of biomedical engineering, which also is open to undergraduates, was up to 56 from about 30 only two years ago.
"Creation of the BME program enhances our ability to go for external funding because for the first time it gives us an identifiable entity," said Craighead. "The goals of the program are to link educational and research strengths in graduate and undergraduate biomedical education across the campus to attract students, help with recruiting and provide more skills in evolving disciplines."
The BME program ultimately is expected to move into Cornell's life science technology building, which is being planned for the central campus. The program will, for the first time, provide an identifiable home for the graduate field of biomedical engineering; an undergraduate and master's five-year program in biomedical engineering; and an undergraduate minor in biomedical engineering accessible to a broad range of students.
In addition, the new program will continue to call upon long-standing partnerships with the Weill Cornell Medical College and the Hospital for Special Surgery, also in New York City. Some engineering faculty members already split their time between Ithaca and Manhattan, advising graduate students in both locations. Biomedical engineering students, for example, will be able to work with such Weill Cornell faculty as Timothy Wright, a professor in the Department of Surgery who studies the performance of bone-implant systems, design of total joint replacements and the properties of ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene.
Shuler obtained his bachelor's degree at the University of Notre Dame in 1969 and his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1973. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1974.
In 1993 Shuler became director of Cornell's first program to offer a bioengineering option to engineering undergraduates. The new minor in biomedical engineering will be radically different, he says: It will be offered by a college, rather than a department and will be based on a set of sequential courses, building on one another, and it will integrate engineering and biology instead of having parallel classes.
Initially, the minor is being offered only to engineering undergraduates. But as other colleges approve the program of study, it will be available to students across campus. For example, the entry point into the BME minor for most engineering undergraduates will be an engineering version of Biology 110. The students also would take biochemistry and the four core BME classes.
The proposed faculty structure for the BME program is for six core engineering faculty, augmented by program faculty from engineering and CALS, and faculty in the graduate field.
Craighead believes that Cornell is forming an approach that works closely with the university's strengths. Traditional biomedical engineering, he says, tends to be aimed in such areas as heart pacemakers and artificial joints.
More information about the BME program can be found online at http://www.bme.cornell.edu.
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