PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE 4 IEEE PULSE ▼ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014 F or most of my career, I have heard rumors that engineering comprises a set of silos, with each discipline nar- rowly defined by a strict set of its own coursework and practices. Indeed, this has been the popular image of engineering for perhaps half a century. Why I believed this, I do not know, as I was one of six bio- engineering faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Illinois, where bio- engineering involvement stretches back to 1950 and which also employed physi- cists, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, musicians, and, of course, a large number of excellent electrical engineers. From my vantage point, engineers comprise the most remarkable of the uni- versity disciplines in our ability to adapt to many new opportunities. It is in our blood: we are driven by both the science and the application of engineering, and we adapt quickly to interesting and profitable areas of investigation and development. Cer- tainly, the adoption of computer technol- ogy was so rapid and thorough that both outsiders and insiders were unaware that they had achieved one of the most sig- nificant transformations of academia and industry that the world has ever seen. The adaptation to the biomedical and biomolecular revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is almost as remarkable. A great many have noted the extraordinary growth in the number of BME departments of colleges and uni- versities in the 1990s (from roughly 25 to 100 in the United States in the space of a decade) and the ever-increasing student interest in the field. This emphasis has led us to overlook the fact that, by my guess, more than half of all engineering depart- ments now have significant BME research and/or coursework. For instance, at the University of Florida, where I work, there is significant BME and biological engineer- ing work in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering, ECE, Computer and Information Science and Engineer- ing, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Agricultural and Biologi- cal Engineering, and in the Engineer- ing School of Sustainable Infrastructure and Environment, not to mention my own Department of BME. Every depart- ment has bioengineering! The widespread transformation of engineering to include a wide portfolio of biomedical applications is truly remarkable. Ever-Expanding Opportunities for the Well-Trained Engineer in BME Industry has clearly seen great opportu- nities—starting with engineering new biomedical diagnostics and therapeutics, sensors, imaging, orthopedics, etc.—the list is very long. Most of these oppor- tunities require both strong traditional engineering disciplinary knowledge and a solid understanding of physiology and molecular biology—knowledge most eas- ily gained with a traditional engineering major and a biomolecular minor, whether formally as coursework or practically on the job. My intuition is that, despite this sig- nificant shift by traditional engineering departments to biomedical applications, much more could have been and cer- tainly soon will be done. For instance, enrollments in ECE, which fell by roughly 50% in the last two decades, would have increased if ECE and computer science departments had understood that they were the stepping stone to more BME jobs than BME departments, especially in health informatics (see [1]). There have been clear winners where the strength of engineering has permeated, if not domi- nated, medical departments, especially in medical imaging and informatics, which attract many electrical engineers. Biologicification of BME College and university BME depart- ments in the United States have trended substantially to research areas empha- sizing the biological and chemical side of bioengineering, e.g., tissue engineer- ing, biomaterials, cellular biomechanics, immunoengineering, pharmaceutics, and biotechnology/bioreactors. These are very exciting areas of scientific research—who wouldn’t want to be the creator of an arti- ficial pancreas or cartilage or other organ? The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding is abundant, mostly from agencies that see these developments as extensions of their historic investment toward the nation’s medical future. This has led many, if not most, BME engineer- ing departments to hire at least some faculty whose training and research is dominantly life science and not engineer- ing application oriented. Certainly, the scope and potential of the biomolecular revolution are breathtaking and inviting to engineers, arguing robustly for much greater involvement of the life sciences in engineering [2]. However, the industrial development in these areas has been modest to date, and the BME job market, although growing quickly percentage-wise, is still small [3]. Certainly, there is a huge biotechnology industry that has been well-served by the nation’s life science educational and research system of the nation, but enhanced in only a limited way so far by the growth in BME. Unfor- tunately, the job market for life scientists is weak at all levels—and, by extension, the Balancing Engineering and Biology in Bioengineering By Bruce Wheeler Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPUL.2014.2321217 Date of publication: 25 September 2014