Experiential Bioengineering Education at the Frontier of Health Care
Welcome to Lehigh's Department of Bioengineering!
In the last few decades, we have seen increasing contributions of engineering and technology to advancing fundamental medical discoveries and their translation into clinical healthcare solutions. There have been groundbreaking new inventions in materials, therapeutics, mechanics, optics and photonics, and more recently, computing which have radically changed the way we address healthcare issues. These inventions have enabled development of technological platforms for early detection of disease, precision diagnostics, minimally invasive interventions, predictive models based on machine learning and multiscale modeling of biological and clinical data sets, and of wireless devices for remote health monitoring and care.
At Lehigh Bioengineering we stride at the forefront of these critical engineering innovations in healthcare. While we are young, having existed as a department only since 2017, our roots stem from our founding in 2003 as an interdisciplinary bioengineering program to leverage the epistemic crosstalk between faculty with biomedical research interests across engineering disciplines in our Rossin College of Engineering. Continuing this legacy, rich and interdisciplinary collaborations remain fundamental to our identity as a department and centric to our educational and research philosophy. This, combined with our emphasis on experiential learning, and our small student to faculty ratios and class sizes, provides opportunities for a personalized learning experience.
Our ABET-accredited undergraduate program incorporates a rigorous curriculum that emphasizes hands-on learning, innovation and entrepreneurship. Our students complete courses in engineering fundamentals, and the physical sciences, and learn critical skills in application of these principles to solving real-world issues in healthcare and biotechnology. Our undergraduates engage in experiential and inquiry-based learning opportunities such as interdisciplinary creative design performed through our Integrated Product Development (IDP) program, the Iaccoca International Internship Program, industry-led projects, and our summer study abroad program at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Our graduate curriculum is designed to provide an educational and research training experience that integrates the life- and physical sciences and engineering while emphasizing academic rigor and quantitative problem-solving for biomedical applications. The extramurally-funded research portfolio of our faculty members spans three thrust areas: a) Materials and Therapies, b) Diagnostics, Sensors and Devices, and c) Biocomputations and Modeling. Our research activities are supported by a wealth of core research facilities and collaborative resources, such as the Health Research Hub (HRH), and the Lehigh Interdisciplinary Research Institutes including the Institute of Functional Materials and Devices (I-FMD) and the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation (I-DISC). Our research portfolio includes projects as diverse as bioprinted 3D-tissue scaffolds for cartilage regeneration and corona-virucidal functional polymers to developing a computational model to explain molecular dynamics of coronavirus interactions and machine learning techniques to detect rare circulating tumor cells.
With collaborative opportunities in data and population sciences proffered by the opening of the Lehigh University College of Health, our educational and research offerings are being increasingly diversified. We also are thrilled to introduce our new faculty member, Yu Zhang (Stanford University), an expert in computational neuroscience, medical imaging computing and AI. The first cohort of our new undergraduate Biocomputational Engineering program will take advantage of new course offerings in the Fall of 2021. We eagerly look forward to the opening of the 190,000 sq. foot, $145 M Health Science and Technology (HST) facility, which will be home to several of our faculty and facilitate their access to enhanced research resources and collaborative opportunities with other faculty from the Colleges of Engineering and Health who are engaged in healthcare-related research.
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
PC Rossin Professor and Department Chair
