Welcome to Lehigh's Department of Bioengineering!
It’s been a packed year, full of faculty and student achievements and continuing evolution as a department. The new ten-year Lehigh University Strategic plan was unveiled earlier this year, with the overarching theme of ‘Inspiring the Future Makers’. In the BioE department, we are working to align our goals with the three tenets of the strategic plan to ‘make it new’ – to articulate a vision for how we innovate, ‘make a difference’ – to apply new knowledge to challenges in health to improve access, diagnosis & treatment and ‘make it together’ – to redefine how we collaborate with partners and communities and extend beyond existing boundaries. At its core, the plan seeks to foster interdisciplinarity in education via design of innovative, cross-disciplinary and inter-college programs and research opportunities relevant to emerging new career pathways for bioengineers.
We are aligning our mission with the university strategic plan by addressing the two grand challenges of health and globalization through multidisciplinary approaches to manage societal health challenges posed by infectious diseases and chronic conditions in a globally relevant manner. We have been focusing our initiatives to address challenges in this sphere and also welcomes our newest faculty addition, Dr. Dhruv Seshadri, who brings to our department new but complementary research expertise in wearable and remote sensors, flexible electronics and medical devices. I would like to highlight faculty/student research on sustainable, low-cost solutions in low-resource environments. We also report on exciting, new interdisciplinary collaborations we seek to grow with university partners in India. A year since our move to the state of the art Health Sciences and Technology (HST) facility on campus, we have settled in and are leveraging the stellar core facilities to grow multidisciplinary research collaborations in the area of health together with other engineering disciplines and our new College of Health. Our graduate students are not to be undone when it comes to innovative research! We have many exemplary student research projects as diverse as using computational tools to provide new insight on olfactory receptor function to developing innovative engineered systems for improving preclinical drug screening.
We have many other student and faculty successes to report that have become synonymous with Lehigh Bioengineering - publications, grant awards, recognitions and student and alumni achievements! It must be acknowledged that much of this would not be possible without the engagement and contributions of you all - our collaborators, alumni, well-wishers, and patrons. A big thank you to all of you.
Please take the time to browse our website to learn about our undergraduate and graduate curricula, faculty, research portfolio, and student and faculty successes. We look forward to hearing from you!
Anand Ramamurthi, PhD, FAHA
Peter C Rossin Professor and Department Chair
Fall 2023
