Rapid advancements in bioengineering call for broad public literacy to help individuals better understand the changes these technologies bring to our lives. However, making bioengineering concepts accessible and relevant, especially to non-science majors, is often challenging. To address this challenge, we designed a general education course aimed…

In response to the growing computational intensity of the healthcare industry, biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate education is placing increased emphasis on computation. The presence of substantial gender disparities in many computationally intensive disciplines suggests that the adoption of computational instruction approaches that lack…

Purpose: Engineering students gain confidence and competency through continual practice of key skills. The social cognitive theory construct of self-efficacy provides a useful measure to assess students' beliefs in their ability to succeed or perform tasks. Research focused on the impacts of curricular engineering design experiences on student…

Challenge: Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) is critical for ensuring the quality, integrity, reproducibility, and traceability of research, particularly in biomedical and bioengineering fields. With increasing demand for GLP-compliant research, integrating GLP principles into the education of biomedical and bioengineering students is essential.…

Mental health is a rising concern in higher education, with increasing numbers of students experiencing mental health challenges. Stress is a common experience for undergraduate students and the first semester of college can be especially stressful for students as they navigate new coursework and surroundings and being without familiar supports.…

Challenge: In biomedical engineering education, curricular cohesion and expectations are crucial yet often not effectively communicated to the student. Novel Initiative: Our novel initiative addresses this challenge by leveraging senior design students within a junior-level biomedical instrumentation course. Through the interactive "Senior…

Purpose: Teaching and learning statistical signal processing in Biomedical Engineering Degrees poses challenges for both students and teachers. Students often perceive signal processing subjects as demanding and somewhat unattractive, with failure rates several times higher than that of other courses. The aim of this work is to address the…

A challenge in building the biomedical engineering human factors course at Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences was integrating meaningful direct experiences with medical products. The instructor also noticed a significant gap between the topics in the course and their surrounding clinical context, a low-income setting. Recognizing…

Should your department offer a course on how to be a scientist and a successful graduate student? We offer this course at George Mason University as a mandatory part of the graduate curriculum, but this is not common practice for graduate biomedical engineering programs. Graduate education in biomedical engineering is evolving rapidly, with an…

Authored by six current and former Biomedical Engineering (BME) Master's Program Directors, this article aims to summarize the types of BME master's programs that are offered in the U.S., delve into the value of BME master's programs, and reveal concerns of BME master's students and directors that are exacerbated among international and…

Purpose: Measurable results of efforts to teach empathy to engineering students are sparse and somewhat mixed. This study's objectives are (O1) to understand how empathy training affects students' professional development relative to other educational experiences, (O2) to track empathy changes due to training over multiple years, and (O3) to…

Biomedical engineering is a rapidly evolving field, with the pace of evolution spurred by technological advancements, the increasing complexity of human health challenges, and globalization of the workforce. It is timely for biomedical engineering educators to explore afresh the competencies that graduates need at present, but more importantly,…

At the Fifth Biomedical Engineering (BME) Education Summit in 2024, the BME education professional community discussed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in a series of workshops. The goals were to identify professional competencies related to DEI that support students after graduation, to outline strategies for including DEI principles in…

Hands-on laboratory courses seldom appear in biomedical engineering (BME) graduate programs, thus limiting graduate students' ability to acquire wet laboratory skills like cell culturing. At large, BME graduate programs rely on ad hoc training provided by senior graduate students; however, this method cannot be extended to new or non-BME…

Clinical immersion programs provide opportunities for biomedical engineering (BME) students to observe the clinical environment and medical devices in use, often leading to the identification of unmet clinical needs. Due to hospital restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person clinical immersion programs were generally not possible in…