Michael Shuler, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering at Cornell University, 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 in 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 Cornell 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 BME and provide a structure to support all Cornell teaching in the field. Laboratory space and equipment in Kimball Hall on the Cornell campus 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 engineering college but also will involve faculty and assistance from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Veterinary Medicine. "We envision courses being team-taught by faculty from life sciences and engineering," says Shuler.

The graduate field of BME at Cornell already has 29 faculty, nine of whom are in the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, part of the long-standing partnerships with the Weill Cornell and the Hospital for Special Surgery, also in New York City. Some engineering faculty split their time between Ithaca and Manhattan, advising graduate students in both locations.

The new 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.

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. He was presented with the Marvin J. Johnson Award of the Microbial and Biochemical Technology Division of the American Chemical Society in 1983 and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Professional Progress Award for Outstanding Progress in Chemical Engineering in 1991. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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 student across campus.

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. By comparison, "Cornell could argue for leadership in nontraditional aspects of biomedical engineering by putting more emphasis on the cellular and molecular levels."